Sonorous fiction from the crawlspace
Thais Akina & Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas
Summer Residency 2024 - RIB Rotterdam
(2024) Rotterdam/NL
duration: 14 min
A two-part performance unfolding from the crawlspace of the RIB, a space shaped by Rotterdam’s portside history and its long relationship with the land.
The soil, marked by past industrial use, influenced how we entered and engaged with this subterranean site.
The first part centers on an instrument built during the residency, played live in the crawlspace by a player-performer. Its low frequencies, though barely audible through the closed lid, register as a low tremor through the floor of the gallery above. A listener-performer, situated in the exhibition space, uses microphones, synthesizers, and speakers to engage in a form of synthetic listening—an attentive, interpretive response to what cannot be fully heard or seen. This act of listening constructs an atmosphere of partial perception, inviting the audience to imagine the presence and contours of the underground space without entering it. In the second part, the lid of the crawlspace is opened. A video projection traces the playing-performer’s gestures as spectral impressions, synchronized with the audio recorded during the first performance. Sound and image together extend the previous act of listening—revealing not the space itself, but its echoes and residues— shaping a shared space between the sensed and the imagined.
Project realized with the support from CBK Rotterdam (Centrum Beeldende Kunst)