AmissingRoom2020

A Participatory Artwork Adapted for Domestic Settings in Times of Social Distancing

With this app downloaded on your phone you get to experience an immersive artwork inside your home.

The work: Symphony of a Missing Room, was first exhibited in 2009 at the National Museum, Sweden (produced by Weld) reflecting the museum as a phenomenon, and architecture. Like a ‘waste-mould-cast’ it activates a symbiotic state between the artwork's perceptual triggers, its museum visitors and the prevailing environment, leaving only experience and memories behind. For over 10 years, the work continued to be shown internationally, opening up new formats and collaborations in the museum environment. Through the years the work started reflecting back on itself, even catching a glimpse of itself. Symphony had become a work of art collecting museums. By incorporating its environments as part of its body, Symphony gradually made itself independent of the institutions where it was conceived.

Symphony of a Missing Room - The Mnemosyne Revolution, 2016. Group Exhibition: An imagined Museum, Centre Pompidou, Metz. Photo on paper. Courtesy Lundahl & Seitl Photo: Symphony of a Missing Room - The Mnemosyne Revolution,2016 Centre. Group Exhibition: An imagined Museum, Centre Pompidou, Metz. Photo on paper. Courtesy Lundahl & Seitl

During these extraordinary times when many cultural institutions are closed and public places are empty, a version was made so that two people can perform / experience Symphony together inside a domestic setting. It is a digital artwork that turns mobile screens into projector lights. By alternating between receiving and guiding roles, throughout the experience you will be asked to close your eyes and follow a score of choreographed suggestions. In tandem with a three-dimensional sound in headphones the process augments a virtual room, shared only between the two of you.

Symphony was exhibited 100 days at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India, 2016-2017, curated by Sudarshan Shetty. The image shows the ‘The Sea of Pain’ by Raul Zurita. The Chilean poet dedicates this work to Galip Kurdi the brother of Alan Kurdi, the three year-old boy who was washed ashore a beach on the second of September 2015, his image has become synonymous with the Syrian refugee crisis.

Or perhaps only partly shared... The experience is reminiscent of how individuals from different generations live side by side, interacting with each other but somewhat failing to coincide and share each other's realities. Inside the missing room, visitors pass through walls, into tunnels that travel through a network of past exhibitions and museums. Other artists, dead and alive, far and near, echo into the symphony as an endless conversation. In the process of creating this potential room of reciprocity between two people, the work serves as a companion, providing a score for interpersonal sensibilities that risk going extinct or being forgotten if not practiced or cared for.

Paul Almasy Louvre, Paris, 1942 © Paul Almasy | AKG images. Almasy’s photograph was taken at the Louvre Museum in Paris, articulating the theme of artworks needing to be remembered by documenting an actual historical event. In 1938 with the threat of war looming, the Louvre curators, under the direction of the museum’s deputy head Jacques Jaujard, were compelled to evacuate the entire museum collection, moving it to chateaux deep in the French countryside and away from imminent danger. In Almasy’s photograph we can see the artist names and inventory numbers for each absent painting inscribed inside the empty frame apertures. Clearly, while the image is suggestive of loss, there was hope too in the form of an expectation that all the works would return and be re-installed in their original locations. Darren Pih, Tate Liverpool.

Background

Symphony, 2020 is a composite experience of Symphony's previous incarnations from some twenty international museums and biennials such as; Martin-Gropius-Bau / Berlin Festspiele, Royal Academy of Arts, Momentum 8 - Tunnel Vision, Center Pompidou-Metz, MMK2 Frankfurt, S.M.A.K, Museum M, Bern Biennale and the 2nd Kochi Muziris Biennale.

It reflects a variety of works such as One Million Years, 1969 - by On Kawara; No More Reality, 1991 - by Phillipe Parreno; Plaster Surrogates, 1982 - by Alan Mcollum, and a photograph by Paul Almasy: Louvre, Paris, 1942.

In Autumn 2020 a first draft of a new commission by Uppsala Art Museum will be released on this App. The work will be developed during one year and then presented as a solo show, to be later acquired into the museum’s collection.

Thanks and credits to:

Nandi Nobel (Designer of the App’s symbols), Emma Ward (Production), Rachel Alexander and Sara Lindström (Dramaturgy and choreography), Genevieve Maxwell, Lisette Drangert, Laura Hemming Love, Catherine Hoffman, Pia Nordin, Moa Hansen, Colin McLean, Lisen Ellard, Lena Kimming (Performers in the Symphony Series since 2009). Voices: Alba Lundahl Seitl & Saskia Vasovic Stefansdotter.

Lundahl & Seitl

Developed by DVA - Creative Technology Studio

CROWDFUND LUNDAHL & SEITL