Artist in Residence at Skaftfell, Seyðisfjörður: exploring 'Tvisöngur'

Tvisöngur, my working space, this is where I have spent the last month, hiking there every day or every other day to sing, record and reflect. A very special and privileged time to experiment, create, write and engage with the site-specific sculpture and the surrounding land. Post production is going to take me a while, I need to live with the work in my studio for a long time.

Conceived by Lukas Kühne, Tvísöngur is a site-specific sound sculpture consisting of five interconnected domes of different sizes. Located in the mountainside, it is overlooking the fjord of Seyðisfjörður. It was installed in 2012 in cooperation with the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art.

Takk Skaftfell Visual Art Centre. Thank you to Pari Stave. Kiitos to Victoria Torboli. Viel danke Lukas Kühne. Thank you to the Henry Moore Foundation for their travel and research grant.

LOL for Middlesbrough Art Weekender with Sound Art Brighton

Synopsis: LOL is a site-specific sonic intervention delivered through the public address system of Middlesbrough’s CCTV surveillance network. Watch an excerpt here https://vimeo.com/763079960

Diffusing an electroacoustic piece through the public address of the CCTV surveillance system was quite exhilarating! This sound art experiment LOL was coordinated by The Auxiliary (Anna Byrne and Liam Slevin) and the Middlesbrough Art Weekender curator Kypros Kyprianou, with the Middlesbrough surveillance management. This project was possible because of the strong partnership that Anna and Liam from the Auxiliary have nurtured with Middlesbrough council. The theme of the 5th edition of Middlesbrough Art Weekender was ‘power POWER’. LOL was one of many events and exhibitions in the Public Space of Middlesbrough.

The heavily charged political content of the piece LOL was concealed under the pretext of making sound art; if it had not been for the Middlesbrough Art Weekender, would have this ever been authorised? Never! ART can be a useful umbrella.

With this work we are hijacking political slogans - DETOURNEMENT - the voice of our leaders to make a political statement. LEVELLING UP the once abandoned Conservative policy is figured prominently in the audio montage, "We intend to unite and level up across the whole of our United Kingdom”, and then pitched down into granular oblivion.

The curator Kypros Kyprianou thought that the work had an air of pre-1989 fall of the Soviet Union when the use of public address was more present and effective on a more regular basis. Unfortunately, in Middlesbrough, the public address speakers were not all operational as we discovered on the first day of broadcast. How often do the CCTV PA speakers get used in Great Britain? CCTVs are mostly watching us, tracking our behaviours, capturing our movements, and listening; but they are very rarely emitting, transmitting aural messages to us.

POVERTY. COULD BE. POVERTY. COULD BE. THEY’RE LAUGHING.

Public address speakers do require maintenance. On the first day LOL was due to start its performance at 2:00 pm, I was with another Sound Art Brighton artist Bob aka A/B Smith who was presenting his interactive sound installation ‘ICU’, a critical comment on modern surveillance technology, for Middlesbrough Art Weekender. We were both positioned in the town centre by the former House of Fraser - now a disused department store - ready to record the first broadcast with our digital recorders. Kersten Glandien - the artistic director of Sound Art Brighton - was positioned at the Exchange Square, ready to document the event and record from another location. But no sound came out of the speakers. After some waiting, I decided to call the surveillance team. They were encountering technical issues and were working “to get the audio working onto the microphones”. We kept on waiting for it to be fixed and so remained positioned at the same location. Eventually we heard the piece in the distance, so after a second call, we found out that there was “a problem with the cabling”, but the piece was now playing at the bus station nearby and other sites around the city. We rushed to the bus station to capture the broadcast; it was very exciting to hear the work for the first time on-site in the town. In the end LOL was played all over town for an extended period, from Thursday until Sunday.

PUBLIC RESPONSE. Passers-by were looking up, searching for the audio source, others speculated that the CCTV network was being hacked in real-time, as I was recording with my digital recorder. “Shoppers left spooked after 'Boris Johnson sounding' voice is randomly played in town centre”; others conveniently ignored the sound. The sonic intervention, a protest without bodies, was bordering on social disruption, if not coordinated and facilitated as it was. Members of the public commented on Twitter, one person declaring: “I imagine when they catch the people responsible, it’ll be jail time”.

Working with a citywide Public Address System was a rare experience and a unique opportunity as a sound artist. The high-pitched beeping signal of the pedestrian crossing was blending triumphantly into the piece.

Photo by Rachel Deakin . Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2022.

Photo by Rachel Deakin . Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2022.

Henry Moore Foundation research grant

Happy and grateful to have been awarded by the Henry Moore Foundation a grant allowing me to travel to remote Iceland and conduct research on and inside Lukas Kühne’s sculpture for one month, Spring 2023.

Located on the Iceland's east coast, 'Tvisöngur' (2012) is a site-specific concrete sculpture tuned to react to certain pitches. The aim is to explore corporeality in our experience of sculpture, and the notion of the inside of sculpture as Kühne's sculpture can be entered. This on-site research sits within my thesis 'On the interplay of voice and sculpture: a hybrid encounter' whose purpose is to understand through a cross-disciplinary approach their intrinsic relationship. Voice and sculpture, when do they connect? Who actively participates in their interplay?

The plinth is long gone, so is representational endeavour. In the 20th century, sculpture has expanded from solid, time and weather enduring, to fragile, ephemeral, biodegradable and even anti-sculptural. Sculpture is carved, cast, built, or not when found as ready-made to exhibit, it is stacked, disintegrated, exploded, and re-assembled. Sculpture in the twenty-first century is indeed “unlimited” as asserted by sculptor Eva Grubinger and curator Jörg Heiser (2011). This statement is preceded by Rosalind Krauss’s seminal article on the expanded field of sculpture in which she concludes that sculpture is now a category that results from the combination of exclusion: if it is neither a landscape, nor architecture, then it is sculpture. Lukas Kühne’s sculpture certainly sits within that field. Kühne states that Tvisöngur becomes a sculpture of singing concrete and explains how the sculpture is built of concrete and consists of five interconnected domes of different sizes. Each dome has its own resonance that corresponds to a tone in the Icelandic musical tradition of five tone harmony and works as a natural amplifier to that tone.

Very often sculpture is looked at, as a three-dimensional shape we can circle. Barbara Hepworth notably invited to touch sculpture and use our own body. “I think every person looking at a sculpture should use his own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ram rod and stare at it, with as sculpture you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it and walk away from it.” But how often do we get to enter sculpture? What is at play here with the on-site research I wish to conduct in Iceland is the corporeality of sculpture, how our body as experiencers interact with the sculpture for a whole sensorium experience from within, from the inside. With corporeality, the voice is in reach and at play as embodied, the voice is a tool of perception and experience of Kühne’s sculpture.

‘Doggerland Channels’ at Phoenix Gallery, Sound Art Brighton

I am pleased to be part of the first festival edition of Sound Art Brighton where I will be premiering my installation 'Doggerland Channels' at Phoenix Gallery.

Wednesday 2- Sunday 6 March 2022, 11am – 5pm
Phoenix 10-14 Waterloo Pl, Brighton BN2 9NB
https://www.phoenixbrighton.org/
https://soundartbrighton.com/

[synopsis]
Doggerland Channels: a generative sound-relief based on the ancient land which once linked Britain to the continent. The cartographic sound art installation for voice and data projection throws a net over the North Sea, revealing the rivers which used to connect us to the continent - when the Thames flowed into the Rhine. Doggerland Channels is a landscape whose borders are fluid, fluvial, in need of being retraced, and revealed for a translated experience of the site. Britain was last connected to Europe through the North Sea about 8000 years ago, and we can expect it to be reconnected during future glacial periods. By responding to the present, and the history of the site, the work questions our connection to the continent, and situates ourselves - as islanders - in this transitionary zone: our political exit from the EU.
What is your relationship to the continent?

This work proceeds from research undertaken in Lincolnshire July 2021.

[credits]
Audio-visual production: Olivia Louvel.
Adobe After Effects: Antoine Kendall.
Support from the Arts Council of England (DYCP).

‘The Sculptor Speaks’ at Hepworth Wakefield

Usually I unplug and pack when I leave, so it was weird leaving the gallery with my work still on, hearing the sound in the distance.

Last time I visited the Hepworth Wakefield Museum was July 2017. In October 2017, I collected footage on the beach in St Ives, not knowing this would form the backbone for the visuals of ‘The Sculptor Speaks’. What an absolute treat to be included in the exhibition ‘Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life’. I enjoyed visiting the exhibition, so dense I visited twice.

Exhibiting the work within Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures brought some constraints - for instance the image had to be quite high on the wall - but also rewards, as one could navigate between her sculptures and my audiovisual piece. Particularly Hepworth’s Spring with its array of strings was resonating with the geometric line being slowly drawn on the wall. The acoustic of the room - gallery 1 - was vast, therefore very reverberant. From the other galleries, we could hear in the distance her voice, as a floating entity. I could envisage how the piece could be developed for multi-speaker diffusion, so I could isolate Hepworth’s voice in the room and create movement of voice.

Hepworth’ s voice was resonating in her own space.

You can also view my piece online here

Searching for the remnants of the forest: Doggerland

Now back home, and in isolation since Thursday - NHS text and trace app flagged us - awaiting results as I write. I was away searching for the remnants of the forest on the Lincolnshire coastlines, exploring Doggerland, the area of land that used to stretch between today’s coast of Britain and Europe. Doggerland was a place of human habitation, now under the North Sea.

The search for the submerged forest was demanding but rewarding: were found tree stumps, tree trunks and fossilized trees in clay on the beach in two locations in Lincolnshire. I am now organising footage, as well as making transcripts of my audio diary, hand-written notes. I am holding back sharing images with you for now, until the audiovisual piece is near completion - this could take a while.

The outcome will most likely be multipartite.

Claiming a hastag #doggerLANDscape

This research on site was possible because of funds awarded by the Arts Council of England.

Photography: Paul Kendall

‘Hepworth Resounds’ Talk for Yorkshire Sound Women Network

I am currently preparing a talk for the Yorkshire Sound Women Network
date: 1st of June. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/olivia-louvel-hepworth-resounds-tickets-154830824163

"Sound artist and composer Olivia Louvel talks about her work, which combines voice, electronic music and multimedia with compelling narratives drawn from archives, texts and other documents. In particular she’ll be revealing the inspirations and technology behind her most recent project, 2020’s [Hepworth Resounds], which explored the life and creative work of Wakefield-born 20th-century sculptor Barbara Hepworth.” https://yorkshiresoundwomen.com/event/olivia-louvel-hepworth-resounds/

Yorkshire Sound Women Network (YSWN) was founded in 2015 by women working in the sound technology industry who wanted to use their skills and influence to address gender and racial inequality. YSWN’s mission is to support a flourishing industry which welcomes, encourages and progresses the inclusion of women at all levels from studio floor to board room, and reflects the diversity of its participating communities.

Aesthetica Art Prize

My sound art installation ‘The Whole Inside’ has been selected for the Longlist Aesthetica Art Prize.

I am delighted to be featured in the anthology Future Now 2021: 125 Contemporary Artists from the Aesthetica Art Prize.

The Aesthetica Art Prize is a place of discovery. Each year we bring you the most talented practitioners from across the world who are making new and innovative works. These pieces discuss the current state of play and dive into some of today’s most pressing topics. Art is the mechanism by which we can begin to make sense of a rapidly changing world. If there has ever been a time that we need art in our lives, it is now. Genres include painting, photography, sculpture, video and installation, and these immersive works are part of a wider line of enquiry into our complex world. The featured projects span the UK, USA, Germany, Canada, Australia, Taiwan and Brazil. Find out more and order your copy here