www.simonwhetham.co.uk
'Place is the Space' collaborations with Gregory Büttner
Installation/intervention/performance, PARKS, Hamburg, Germany, June 28th - July 2nd 2022
for betweenEbbandFlow : interstitial spaces
Gregory and I proposed to make a new version of Place is the Space for the new festival betweenEbbandFlow : interstitial spaces to work with outdoor sites and respond to each other and the place with sound over visual communication. We were given access to the open sided halle space at PARKS which houses a concrete ping pong table and is often filled with the sound of the factory opposite. A challenge to work with...
Over only 5 days we explored what worked/was possible and what didn't/wasn't. The final presentation took place over 6 hours on July 2nd 2022 with us rebuilding and reinstalling everything we had done the previous days, then altering, adjusting, moving, adding and then subtracting elements and actions until by 21:00 the space was returned to its original state.
Place is the Space for Klub Katarakt, Hamburg, Germany, 19th January 2020
A specially commissioned version of Place is the Space was presented at the annual festival for new music Klub Katarakt. We responded to the situation by starting on the stage in a 'traditional' tabletop performance but with things happening already as the audience entered and sat down. We then took various objects, devices and combinations out into the room and within the audience so each person heard and experienced the work in a very different way.
Photos below by Jann Wilken
Site-specific installation/intervention/performance project, Gängeviertel, Hamburg, Germany, Jul-Aug 2018
Following our previous collaborations at Arc Artist Residency, Switzerland and during the Blurred Edges festival in Hamburg in 2016, Gregory secured funding from Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Behörde für Kultur und Medien for us to work together again.
This time we wanted to concentrate more on exploring the space itself and its acoustic characteristics, so spent 2 weeks in the Probebühne im Gängeviertel space trying many different methods to sound the room with devices, actions and sound equipment.
By the end of the second week we had refined our approach and actions, and worked out a rough order of events for the piece.
Photographs by Gregory Büttner and Simon Whetham
The third week saw us transpose all of our sound making devices and apparatus to the MOM Art Space, which as you will see is completely different from the rehearsal space we had been using. It took the first two days to reinstall and reconfigure the installation elements, testing their combinations and effectiveness as we did so.
Photographs by Gregory Büttner and Simon Whetham
By the end of the third week we were ready to present the piece to the public of Hamburg. We had a surprisingly large audience, which was great for us, but made the performative parts of the piece a little more difficult.
Photographs by Michael Münnich
Below is a video edit of one of our 'rehearsals' in the space, kindly captured by Anja Winterhalter
