Hollowed Water

4k Back Projection with sound, 280 x 280cm 3:08 (check duration ?? *)

commissioned by Camden Arts Centre, London, for Hollowed Water (solo) 2020.

The particular notion of Percussion relative to these works, is the one that presumes silence as a state prior to the event of a percussive sound: i.e. a drum punctures silence. A bell, a snap of two fingers splits the silence in two parts ; before and after it.

It is like a very primordial and binary state of the begginings of a language : not dissimilar to a 0s and 1s system.Then comes rhythm, a pattern repetitive or not at all, but carrying information which we instantly decode as emotive, dynamic, structural, syntactical.

This notion of percussive ‘tools’ is also an idea of intimacy ; the word ἅπτω - (haptics ) means primarily to touch, but this is a notion of touching in order to identify an object, its nature, its soundness : Like a cat taps gently on a surface with its paws well before it climbs on it, to test whether its rigid enough to hold its weight, to get a feeling of what its made of.