Sound Gestures with Fedde ten Berge and Allard van Hoorn
Kentalis School, Amsterdam
Sound Gestures II
An Urban Songline
Kentalis/Signis is a primary school for deaf and hearing impaired children. During a period of three years De Appel and Kentalis will collaborate in an effort to investigate sound and the ownership of sound through three artistic projects known as ‘Sound Gestures’.
The second Sound Gestures project was a collaboration between the artists Fedde ten Berge and Allard van Hoorn. During this project the pupils aimed to render the auditorium of De Appel into a concert for ‘tactile materiality’. Through various workshops the pupils created their own ‘Urban Songline’: a location-specific interpretation of (interior) architecture into music.
The pupils where guided through different methods for transforming found materials within the auditorium (such as concrete / brick / linoleum / steel / glass / textile / plastic / wood / air) into sound / frequencies. These sounds where composed into a symphony, aiming to illustrate the form and function of the surrounding space by using ‘Pentacle’: a sound system of 15 speakers and 3 subwoofers developed by Fedde ten Berge.
During this project the pupils experimented with different methods of ‘deep listening’ with the intent of encouraging them to further examine and explore their everyday surroundings.
Fedde ten Berge (1983) is an Amsterdam based sound artist who creates work across different contexts and disciplines. In his work, Fedde challenges his audience to leave the comfort zone of the distant spectator and, to a large extent, take responsibility for the experience of his work. In exhibiting his work he is looking for social aspects and alludes to playful interaction in between his audience.
Allard van Hoorn (1968) is a sound-, installation- and performance artist creating choreographies for architecture, urban structures as musical scores, scenographies for the built environment and scripts for investigating our relationships to (public) spaces and nature. 'My main body of work consists of Urban Songlines, a utopian/dystopian series of collaborative translations of buildings, urban structures and public spaces into music through site-specific sound-generation. These performances are a way of connecting to places by listening to them as well as a research into how we use and experience the public domain and to what degree we can claim ownership over it, discussing notions of inclusion, becoming and belonging.’