Performance on Thursday, July 19th at 8 p.m.
We kindly ask you to arrive on time — the duration of the performance is approximately 45 minutes.
“The PLACE may indeed look exactly like any other fragment of reality. However, there are some areas in the world that are thought of as particularly fit for becoming PLACES.” — W. Borowski, H. Ptaszkowska, M. Tchorek, “An Introduction to the General Theory of Place” (1966)*
The Place is a composition and sound performance created by Paolo Thorsen-Nagel for and at the Edward Krasiński studio. It imagines, through sound, the enigmatic history of the place and the space that holds it. By making use of field recordings that capture various sonic characteristics of the apartment and its surroundings, as well as reacting to it through recorded and performed electronic sounds, The Place explores the possibilities of the adjacent glass pavilion as a performative vessel for the continuation of the legacy, one that is heard, not seen. In further recordings recently made for the performance Thorsen-Nagel attempts to reflect the place as a whole, setting it in motion with various speakers spread out inside it. Microphones traverse this movement, as one might an apartment, listening to it from several more or less fluent positions, assuming place as a constant in the flux of sound. The Foksal Gallery program from 1966 states: “The PLACE cannot be mechanically fixed up but it must be incessantly perpetuated”*. The disparate recordings become amplified in the pavilion structure, providing a kind of parallel studio setting in which the architecture, the audience and the proliferation and perception of sound all become part of an animated movement that define the place, here and now.
A recording of the performance will remain at the Edward Krasiński studio / Avant-Garde Institute on a long-term loan and will be activated on special occasions.
Paolo Thorsen-Nagel (b. 1985, Chicago) is a German-American musician and artist. In his sound, performance, and moving image works, he concentrates on the materiality of sound and its relationship to physical and psychological space, as well as their visual dependency. He was Sound and Music Advisor for documenta 14, as well as the curator of Listening Space, Athens, and co-curator of the documenta 14 concert series at Megaron, the Athens Concert Hall (2017). Recent projects include Windowlicker at Balice Hertling, Paris (2018); Interiors II (Athens), Listening Space, documenta 14, Athens (2017); Interiors at Mavra, Berlin, and Measures at Taylor Macklin, Zurich (2016); a performance with Tobias Spichtig, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015); (Untitled) Hannah Weinberger, with Jannik Giger, Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014); Words on Pictures–Puns and Punishment, for Avery Singer, Kunsthalle Zurich (2014); Orchestra, with Calla Henkel, Max Pitegoff, and Tobias Spichtig, New Theater, Berlin (2014); S.S.O.R., for Adriana Lara, Kunsthalle Basel (2012); and a featured performance in Alexandra Bachzetsis’s Etude, documenta 13, Kassel (2012).
* W. Borowski, H. Ptaszkowska, M. Tchorek, “An Introduction to the General Theory of Place”, announced in Puławy in 1966 and published in Program Galerii Foksal PSP, Warszawa 1967