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Grazer Kunstverein moves to the market.
Every Wednesday and Saturday, from 6 AM to 1 PM, the Eggenberg Bauernmarkt in Graz is filled with the sounds of people selling and buying regional products. The rest of the week the Eggenberg market lies abandoned. Then it becomes the playground of other sounds, mostly environmental. Buildings can not only host but also make sounds, as when the heat of the sun works on wood, an earthquake hits a skyscraper, when the wind makes the tiles clatter, old doors and windows come to squeak, the rain trickles on roof tops or footsteps echo back from solid walls. Yet buildings themselves can also be conceived as embodiments of frozen sound; sounds living in all the different materials that constitute a construction, in consonance with one another resounding beyond what the human ear can perceive. BARRY aims to make the sound heard that lives in the Eggenberg Market, making it perceptible, so that the construction can be valued for what it resonates with or expresses, instead of for what it hosts. The sound piece is meant as a gift to the building and the areas surrounding it (people included).
BARRY was conceived in a wild garden that had come to overgrow structures of left-over bricks, hidden walls with pieces of debris, and one decrepit and abandoned shed, but that still offered a few pathways and an entrance that also functioned pretty well as an exit. The only thing that came to BARRY’s mind was: ‘If this is the situation; let us take that as point of departure’. To develop more skills in dealing with situation-departures, BARRY became students at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam where they functioned simultaneously as tutors to the works of art that were developed. Since then, BARRY has not been looking for situations but has rather wandered around to see which situations that could function as artistic points of departure would announce themselves. Instead of working in one medium and becoming more and more trained in using it, BARRY found that dealing with situation-departures was best handled by the media that could be solicited for the job, like an improvised movie, a theater play, a speed visit to a non-museum, poetry found along the side of the road, the development of a new letter, a set of lemmas from a fictionalized encyclopedia, or a music piece based on the sound of a building. BARRY can be bought and sold but is best handled when given the space to find a situation. BARRY is based in the Netherlands, somewhere in between the relevant latitudes of coincidence.
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