TONSPUR revives the passage under Maribor's City Hall with sound

This year two TONSPUR sound installations will revive the passage between the City Hall (Rotovž) Square) and Main (Glavni) Square.

From Friday, 23rd of October at 17.00 till Thursday, 5th of November at 17.00 you can listen to the project Yamamayu, by the artist OR poesis. It is a bio-acoustic sound-research project centring on the sonority of the Japanese oak silkmoth, a nocturnal moth that, between the middle and the end of the 19th century, successfully assimilated in Slovenian deciduous forests. These forests have pronounced annual cycles and, at least until recently, prominent temperature amplitudes between summer and winter. This poetic research captures the life cycle of a yamamayu: larva, pupa and adult. The aspiration is the artist’s fascination with dislocated nocturnal poetic sonorities and with the sylvan-abstract textures of Japan and the local space, the artist’s affirmative and existential environment. The yamamayu nocturnal moth entwines all these elements. The artist collected its silk cocoons in the forests at the end of summer, not knowing until recently that precisely the light green cocoon of silk threads represents the remainder of the insect’s process of metamorphosis and concretely connects various forces and dislocated spaces.

From Thursday, 5th of November at 17.00 and for at least the next six months we will be listening to the project Private dots and public clouds. As the current situation demands that we isolate ourselves, stay in our homes and not share public space, we have to create digital spaces via technological devices and software in order to connect and communicate with others. During this time, these virtual spaces are seen as replacements of public spaces. They are intersections of our private surroundings, allowing the creation of alternative modes of gathering and, more deeply, of possible forms of publicness within the privateness. How could we then record these virtual spaces within our homes?
Private Dots and Public Clouds is based on a recording of a silent online meeting using a video conference software. During this meeting, we refrained from talking and we tried to listen to the space that emerged out of the overlapping sounds of all our individual environments within our laptop speakers. Every participant has recorded this meeting from their own laptop. These recordings, whose sounds and rhythms are modulated and filtered by everyone’s respective internet connection, result in differently sounding perspectives of the same shared virtual place. Therein, we tried to portray our personal contexts within the current situation.