WaterLines2 - a site specific sound and digital art installation
Aleksandra Vrebalov, composer and Ronit Eisenbach, architect, Chestertown Bank, MD
The work explores the ideas and intersection of cultural, economic, and ecological wealth, especially in relation to Chestertown, the Chester River, and the Chesapeake Bay. The Bank was the first physical location of this interchange, making it a prime site for a temporary work that seeks to remind people of the town's important relationship with the river and its natural environment. Chestertown was founded on the wealth of the river and this performance artwork sheds light on how that relationship has changed with time.
Andrew N. Case in conversation with Aleksandra Vrebalov for Edge Effects
Chestertown is a bit off-the-beaten path, and unlike some of the other rivers of Chesapeake region, the Chester is not particularly well known. How did you approach learning about the area and its human and natural histories? What became the most salient points of those histories that informed the WaterLines pieces for each of you?
I arrived to Chestertown knowing very little about its cultural/historical background. We had an amazing support from the Sandbox’s director Alex Castro, who facilitated numerous meetings, visits and interviews to prepare us for the residency. I made a total of six visit over a year, and was excited to experience the place through a lot of walks, through visits to several distinctly different places of worship for Sunday services, as well as through the contacts and visits with faculty and students at the Washington College. In my case, being an immigrant was a benefit in this process, because my lack of shared history with the place made everything feel fresh, new, inspiring, and at the same time evocative of sounds and smells of the river on which I grew up, Danube (Novi Sad, Serbia). That commonality of experience (related to life in towns on rivers) was a very useful realization -- it showed me that both local and universal themes were necessary to explore in our project.
One of the phrases we often hear in the environmental arts and humanities is about "bridge-building" and the need for bringing together different communities: whether those communities are scholarly, artistic, or neighborhoods situated in place. What were the bridges you were each most interested in building with this project?
My interest was primarily to connect people with the environment (both the inside of the bank with its new temporary function as a performance space, and the outdoor, natural environment) through the sound. I thought that bringing the sounds of the river and the natural environment of Chestertown into a performance space would pose a question of how we relate to those everyday sonic experiences that surround us. They connect us to our environment, but often, because of their regularity and commonness pass unnoticed. Sounds are identity and memory markers, aural signatures of the place, and give a listener a strong sense of place – by removing the ”bank” sounds from the bank (soundscape of previous business transactions, tellers, and deposit safes still ringing in the ears of residents/clients), and inducing a different aural experience, we hoped to symbolically show the transition that the town has been going through. By playing with these two aural worlds, my hope was to affirm a sense of belonging and stability amidst the change.
Much like community, collaboration is one of those words that is central to interdisciplinary explorations of the environment and yet the process of collaboration––as in literally working together-- can be easily over-idealized. In what ways did this project challenge each of you as collaborators?
I was very stimulated by being in a group of artists who had such a strong direction in their own individual creative process. Coming from different disciplines, the timing of gestation, production and presentation of our work greatly varies for each of us, and we needed to negotiate that. It seemed that having all four of us involved until the very end of the creative process might not be even possible, but then, we did it. Having different stages of completion of individual contributions posed a challenge, as we needed to weave the individual segments into a whole, but at the same time it was inspiring, stimulating, and very organic to leave those individual parts to merge in ways that we could not predict. We ended up branching out into an art show, a site-specific sound installation, and a performance, all presented at the final evening, showing the aspects of our work that had been completed over several months as well as created live at the closing event, with the participation of the local community.
In many ways the WaterLines pieces struck me as profoundly local in that they were made of river muds, local soundscapes, the moving bodies of dancers and area residents, not to mention a historic bank building and its vault. At the same time, the projects clearly sought to transcend the local. Did it feel to each of you as if that happened? What were the broader themes and ideas you were hoping to illuminate in these local pieces?
I remember that the word subliminal kept coming back in our description of how the sound and image in the sound installation might work together. We played with symbols that were sampled from the everyday, concrete, local setting, both in sound and image, like water, birds, boats, soil, earth jars, hands, etc. So, the range of possible ways to interpret them was very wide – from specifically local, to universal, to mythical, and all those interpretations and experiences were equally valid. In my case, a broader theme to illuminate in the piece was a sense of place, and that is a universal theme. If we truly hear the sounds that surround us they define us in relationship to the environment, anchor us in time and space, making us present and aware of our place in the moment. They make us feel alive.
November 3, 2015
Edge Effects is a digital magazine about environmental issues produced by graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), a research center within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studiesat the University of Wisconsin–Madison.