Incompleting places

What happens when that which saturates the foreground is relegated to the background? And what emerges when we attend to what appears distant, yet at the same time remains strangely familiar? 

This project explores what happens when we listen to the background in both a spatial and temporal sense and examines what happens when various materials of language are brought into the foreground as well as in the background. What can these materials tell us when we listen? – and how can we enter into dialogue with these materials? 

Incompleting Places approaches language as a materiality encompassing visuality as language, sound as language and the written and spoken word as language, and the exposition explores what happens when these languages change positions. Taking as its point of departure the dual meaning of background—both as the spatial background that is physically distant and as the structural background internalized over time and which (paradoxically) saturates our foreground—the exposition examines how proximity and distance shape how we listen, and how displacements between foreground and background might surrect modes of listening through which places are rendered incomplete.

The project has been published in the peer-reviewed journal VIS - Nordic Journal of Artistic Research, issue #15 ‘TEMA: MED SPRÅKET/ MOT SPRÅKET/ I SPRÅKET,’ and can be accessed via the link below.