In the world of contemporary art, we’re seeing more and more practices that test the boundaries between disciplines. The work of award-winning composer and visual artist Mira Calix can be thought of in this way. Operating at the intersection between art, music and performance, she explains that her cross-disciplinary approach comes about when “one cannot survive without the other”.
Broadly speaking, Calix is interested in making things whole. Her newest work, Inside There Falls, is an exercise in sensory activation. Based on a text written by Brett Clegg, it is also a meditation on narrative flow. “There is a strong sense of narrative but it’s non-linear,” says Calix. “It’s a very open and loose text – the kind of story you can’t describe. There’s a lot of evocative imagery. I’m interested in the idea of dipping into a story and exploring where it takes you and how you hold onto it.”
Premiering at Carriageworks as part of Sydney Festival in a few short weeks, this walk-through installation is constructed as a kind of labyrinth. Sounds permeate the space between cascading sheets of paper while professional dancers move through it. Depending on which path you take, the dance sequences can be quite elusive. “It’s less about performance and more about moving the story forward,” says Calix. “You may never encounter them or you may, so there’s an element of chance.”
In creating a work that is non-prescriptive and open to individual stories, these walls of blank pages convey how authorship is given over to the viewer. “I wanted to create the sensation of what it’s like to be in a book,” says Calix. “And when the audience comes, they participate in the narrative, they become part of the work and they take it away with them, so the work doesn’t end in the place where it started.”
With this installation, Calix is tapping into the intrinsic human desire to be told a story. By absorbing the fragments of narrative that are woven into the soundscape, the viewer constructs their own version of what is being said. “That’s what we naturally do,” says Calix. “We relate to and reject certain characters and events. We also have access to more stories than ever and have developed a strong desire for long-form stories, which is funny because we do things more quickly. Twitter is only 140 characters, yet we have television series like Breaking Bad with highly developed characters.”
In addition to exploring the malleable space between the listener and the teller, Calix is interested in how architecture can be altered through sound. While a labyrinth could seem a claustrophobic place to be, this multi-sensory experience is full of narrative materials that are designed to propel the viewer forward. In navigating through sound and silence, movement and stillness, there is a sculptural musicality to Inside There Falls. Probably one of the more ambitious events on the Sydney Festival calendar, it is uniquely collaborative and interactive.
The work is part of another program at Carriageworks called Sound/On Sound, pulling together a range of internationally acclaimed artists. This focus on sonic installations represents a shift towards more cross-disciplinary forms of art-making.
“Generally speaking, people don’t embrace sonic experimentation the way they do visual experimentation,” says Calix. “We’re all accustomed to an Yves Klein monochrome now, so perhaps it’s a matter of time. Globally, it’s a slow process and it’s trickier to manage from a curatorial perspective, but sound has the capacity to reach people in a way that visual art does not.”
Inside There Falls as part of Sydney Festival 2015atCarriageworksfromThursday January 8 – Saturday January 17, tickets online.
