"Connecting Acoustic Spaces" is an installation comprised of light glass sculptures and a multichannel soundscape created with ca.500 collected audio recordings from 6 continents, 40 countries, 140 cities, and towns around the world since the corona lockdown. Dating from March 2020 to March 2021, I invited artists, friends, colleagues, and people to send me recordings of their acoustic environments.

Hence, I am involved in how we listen and interpret our surroundings, especially amid a global pandemic and its partial lockdowns in different time frames, intensities, and outcomes. As a result, it has become more relevant to me how, gradually, our noise footprint increases and how unaware we were (are?) of its huge impact. This has brought me to reflect on the need to understand our own acoustic agency and how it tunes in or makes sense with our and other sonic environments: How do we imagine ourselves as listening objects/ bodies?

Connecting Acoustic Spaces delves into this acoustic agency through conductive materials such as glass that, in turn, create sonic shell-like-dwellings from multichannel soundscapes. The glass creatures create personal acoustic arenas for those specific pandemic audio files collected and shared by my peripheral community.

These biological shell creatures protect and demarcate acoustic spaces, allowing us to observe and listen. The shelter becomes a means to isolate an ecology that simultaneously makes an ideal environment differentiated from the exterior of their present acoustic moment.

I have created these fictions inspired by nature's acoustic shapes for these audio files to re-exist and resonate. These sheltered sounds can be heard and felt through the transparency and reflection of the glass.

The sculptures thus embody all those different listening ears.

I will like to thank everyone who contributed with sound and Simon Veres for his endless support.

Glass production:
by artist Maria Koshenkova  with the team of Holmegaard Værk (DK)
Glasshütte Comploj, Vienna (AT)

Graphic Design:
Sam de Groot

with the support of Fonds Podium Kunsten (NL) and Mondriaan Fonds (NL)