a love past and present, leaking, glowing is an exhibition of new work by Feronia Wennborg as part of Rumours & Murmurs: An Archive Project, curated by Ruby Eleftheriotis.
Wennborg’s sound installation unfolds as a cocooning swell of atmospheric worlds. Moving across multiple speakers, the audio drifts non-linearly between textural sounds, vocal fragments and hazy clouds of affect and abstraction. a love past and present, leaking, glowing invites you to pay deep attention to the resonances and relationships that swirl and radiate around and between us.
Recorded with hand-held equipment that allows the artist close proximity, Wennborg has gathered sounds from places around Nordnes that hold emotional significance to her. These recordings were made across the seasonal transition from autumn into winter and towards spring. In parallel, there are recordings made at her home in the midst of daily life.
Multiple sounds in the installation stem from an accidental discovery. While speaking on the phone with a long distance friend, Wennborg absent-mindedly flicked the edge of a kitchen knife against her fingertip, producing a bright, citrus-sharp tone which she later repeated and recorded in her bedroom. This gesture dances on a threshold between closeness and withdrawal, intimacy and risk.
Other sounds spring from textures of rain recorded on the edge of an open window, the trickling of a storm drain, the wet vapour and excited tingles from making coffee and cooking in the kitchen with her partner.
Rather than documenting passing events, the work attends to what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart describes as the «thickness of a situation». Each recording carries traces of the lush worlds in which it was made: worlds teeming with emotions, intimacies, creatures and stories that unfurl between lived experiences.
Within the installation, transducer speakers are attached to surfaces in the room, activating the architecture of the space through vibration. Wennborg spent time with Hordaland Kunstsenter, singing with the walls and the view out the window of the exhibition space. She became attuned to the rhythms and whispers of the building and its subtle presences.
The work emerges from small flickers of the everyday – phone calls, walks, domestic gestures, impulses and passing distractions. In this sense, a love past and present, leaking, glowing can be understood as a continuous, unstable archive of lived affect and personal memories – re-thinking the archive as a field of resonances instead. In the archive space, there is an invitation to note your impressions of the exhibition and place them in Wennborg’s archive folder in the drawers. There is also a publication that compiles notes, traces and research from Wennborg and Eleftheriotis’exploration into the archive.
Threaded with whispering hums and watery vibrations, the installation composes a shifting field of proximity and distance. Intimate moments are amplified, stretched out, magnified and honoured. This installation gestures towards an ongoing-ness, where lines of potential come together and fall away endlessly. Though the moment of recording has passed, its shimmering flecks continuously unfold around us in the space, staying alive in their ambiguity.
FERONIA WENNBORG is an artist and musician based in Bergen. Her practice moves across performance, installation, composition and digital environments, often working in close collaboration with others. With attention to everyday rituals and relationships with place and listening, her work lingers with moments of intimacy.Recent projects have been presented at: Lydgalleriet (Bergen), Konsthall C (Stockholm),Centro de Cultura Digital (MexicoCity), Cafe OTO (London), and Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow). Feronia is currently a PhD fellow in artistic research at the Art Academy, Faculty of Fine Art, Music, and Design, University of Bergen. RUMOURS & MURMURS: AN ARCHIVE PROJECT is a curatorial project initiated by curator and writer Ruby Eleftheriotis, developed in collaboration with Hordaland Kunstsenter (HKS). In this project Bergen-based artists are invited to explore and engage with HKS’s public archives. Rumours & Murmurs works to transform static records into “fluid constellations”,inviting alternative readings and seeing the archive as a place of imagination, speculation and intuition.
