Encuentros

Elastic membrane microphones made of silicone and piezoelectric sensors, outdoor speakers in painted steel structure, effect pedals, electronics

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Thomas Aurin

Photo: Thomas Aurin

Ambiguity, belonging, and codes of communication are fundamental to the work of Nicole L’Huillier. For her installation Encuentros (Encounters), she developed a transceiver system that translates the island’s sounds into varying frequencies and mixes artificial and natural sounds into an acoustic space.

This system comprised of rectangular listening membranal apparatuses rethink the observer and observed from a posthuman perspective, where the observer is not exclusively human and the action of observing or being observed is in the intra-activity of two performative networked systems. In its receiver function the membranal apparatuses respond to the sounds near them, activating a sound system based on the reciprocal relationship of transmitting and receiving.

A membrane is a porous structure that is elastic in its essence and like the skin, a threshold that mediates and permeates continuity. It has the condition of being inner and outer at the same time, and is conceptually and physically a body of dualisms and multiplicities. A resonant membrane has the capacity of receiving vibrations as well as producing and transferring them, which means that a membrane can receive as well as transmit sounds.

In this regard Encuentros is a perpetual and dynamic call-and-response, an improvisational architecture where the act of listening/receiving is foundational. The membranal apparatuses produce and receive vibrations, separate and connect. They inhabit the island and enter into an ongoing conversation with the (natural and artificial) sounds of this environment, which leads to the blurring of borders transforming into a sonic condition of being inbetween.

With her work L’Huillier challenges our understanding of belonging by disrupting the threshold of what once was and what may become – a phyiscal and theoretical place of reconfigurations.