Nell'aria V (Christina Kubisch: On Air)

Christina Kubisch will present, on Thursday 11 March at 6.30 pm, her complete cycle of environmental performances of the Eighties in a new multimedia event organized by e/static in collaboration with dieSchachtel, Milan. The exhibition features an innovative multi-media presentation of an enhanced CD (audio + multimedia) and a special multiple, 99 pieces only edition, contained in a special transparent/opaline sleeve, each individually hand-drawn by the author herself.
Kubisch was born in Bremen in 1948. Having studied painting, music, and electronic engineering, she pursued her artistic activities as a solo performer in the 1970s, after which she started creating sound sculptures and installations. Trained as a composer (she studied with Franco Donatoni in Milan, and Mauricio Kagel in Darmstadt), she has artistically developed such techniques as magnetic induction to realize her room-related installations of sound, light and music. Since the ’70s, Kubisch has explored the possibilities of sound; many of her works are set up in specific spaces (often public spaces) and, by juxtaposing artificial environments with nature, many of them raise questions about these situations and the relationship between them. Today, she is one of the most important artists in her field. She has been invited to exhibit at numerous international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1982) and Documenta 8 (1987). Ars Electronica, Linz (1987), Biennale, Sydney (1990) Donaueschinger Musiktage (1993 und 1997), Sonambiente, Berlin (1996), In Medias Res, Istanbul (1997), Sonic Boom, London (2000), Visual Sound, Pittsburgh (2001), Sounding Spaces, Tokyo (2003).

ON AIR
This cycle of environmental/sound installation explored the relation between ambient and sound, it was realized using magnetic induction and special headphones, so space and music really can form an indissoluble unit.
“...Even if our listening reality is spherical, in general our way of listening is frontal: a comparison between the player and the listener, between podium and orchestra seat. I left the concert hall to look for new settings for music, places where you could listen while moving freely in space. Places where resonant space becomes a fundamental element along with the musician and the audience. Thus were born concerts in a forest, a basement, a tower, a former factory, shipyards, a cloister; on walls, roofs and terraces. Each work is a different composition, created for ‘that place’. From this came the need to investigate the sonorous reality of the setting itself: to become acquainted with it, listen to it, live it by welcoming its vibrations. This is how various sonorous territories originated, inside of which I distribute the individual musical parts, composed especially for them. The guiding thread of sound in this case should be understood in the literary sense: a series of electrical wires form an electromagnetic labyrinth which the listener deciphers with the aid of special earphones, designed and realised for the purpose. During the journey, the visual structure is transformed into sonorous material. Thus, a composition is born which opens up the possibility of a mixage between one musical flow and another, caused by the free movement of the listener among the individual sonorous sectors”. (C. Kubisch, 1984)