Diana Duta – mess-punkt
Monday, 7 September⋅3:40 – 4:00pm
This afternoon at 3:40pm Diana Duta presents ‘mess-punkt’ (Middle Rhine)
‘The wind has stopped. Time has stretched. What do you see? Water. Only water.’
The middle is an abstraction. Here, time holds different meanings for different species. How does a rock experience the slow passage of years? This sound piece was recorded in one continuous take, with all the elements flowing together at once, spontaneously intersecting voices and the many sonic streams, perhaps not unlike the erosional forces that give shape to landforms. Lorelei, the steep slate rock located in the Middle Rhine Valley appears like an ear of stone, picking up reflections carried by storm and wind. A sea-singer, merrow or mélusine, wandering about the shore. Not only a place, but a presence rising above the many bodies of water, contained both around and within us. The sounds are elongated and convoluted, challenging our highly subjective projection of time, as forever flowing forward. For at the smallest scale of reality, time vanishes; there is no difference between past and future.
Narrator: Loes Verstappen, reciting ‘The Nature Book’ from memory
Voice of Lorelei: Niamh Cullen
Research help: Enrico Floriddia
Precious inspiration: Alice Oswald, Michel Serres, Jean d’Arras, W.B. Yeats
Sound: live natural radio stream of VLF in Heidelberg, waterphones, stretched voice of Mélusine, and recordings on location at the Lorelei rock in Sankt Goar, Middle Rhine Valley
Diana Duta is a Brussels-based artist working with sound in hypnotic ways, and a background in art and socio-cultural linguistics.
