TUNING IN - THE NEIGHBORHOOD

2019|Performance

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Tuning In – the neighborhood is a sound event, a gathering and an open invitation to participate in the ritual of musical tuning in public space. The event involves a simple instruction score laid out on the ground inviting musicians, inhabitants and the public to play a single note “a” and to tune to each other over the period of one hour. While the musicians are positioned in a public outdoor area, the inhabitants tune in from the windows of their homes and studios. Tuning In – the neighborhood explores the possibility of unsettling the division between private and public space, performer and listener, intimacy and publicness. The event focuses on the ritual of musical tuning as formative act where through gathering, synchronization, playing and listening to each other, a temporary community comes into being.

 

Setting this ritual in the heart of the WG-terrein* as artistic and social gesture that is being hosted by the WG community, and inviting the inhabitants to participate from their homes and studios, the event stages a public action in both public and private spaces simultaneously, amplifying the presence of the existing community and celebrating the idea of mutual hosting. Drawing on transgressive nature of sound the event culminates in establishing a threshold zone that is neither entirely public nor exclusively private, but that emerges as an ambiance in which one always already contains the other.

In collaboration with DNK Ensemble and the inhabitants of WG-terrein, as part of Social Capital #2 Amsterdam-West.

* WG-terrein, Amsterdam is a self-organised artist run compound consisting of over 130 studios that has been established in 1984.