Albertine (2024)
Film and Soundscape, Via Garibaldi, Venezia
Supported by British Council Venice Biennale Fellowship, In collaboration with Dr Isaac Gibson and Abbie Bradshaw
Albertine (2024) is a filmic multi-channel sonic installation, installed atop a fruit and veg barge on the remaining portion of canal on Via Garibaldi, situated in the space between the Biennale’s partner locations, The Giardini and The Arsenale. The barge is representative of both a carrier and a container and its physical placement grants the work a sense of liminality. Via Garibaldi is what is referred to as a ‘rio tera’, translating literally to a street that has been ‘earthed-in’. Border line traces of the original canal can be found demarcated in the laying of the paving slabs, serving as a visual representation of the remnants of time that these sites are imbued with- a quality that Albertine seeks to conjure sonically.
Albertine utilises a series of spatial ‘interviews’ with the architecture of the British Pavilion and the remaining canal on Via Garibaldi, conducted via modified hydrophones and shortwave radio. Drawing on the theories of Italian inventor and physicist, Guglielmo Marconi, who speculated that ‘no sound ever dies’, rather it just decays beyond the point of detection by the human ear.
These frequencies of our shared past which Marconi refers to, were picked up as static through DIY short-wave radio, allowing for a physical and bodily dialogue with the space, moving a long antenna, detecting an abstract yesterday around us, conversing with the 'voices' of our shared past. This ephemeral intangibility of the sonic and memory alike, is exemplified throughout the composition of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913), even the discrepancies over the translation of the title, In Search of Lost Time in favour of In Remembrance of Things Past, the ‘search’ itself implies a palpability to its findings, as if one could encounter a past self on the piazza at San Marco and physically embrace them. Something ‘lost’ has the possibility of being found, whereas a simple ‘remembrance’ infers that the physicality contained within such thought is irrecoverable. It is the desire to contain in the combined theory of Proust and Marconi in which Albertine positions itself.
Titled in reference to Proust’s love interest, Albertine is repeatedly referred to as a vessel, one which houses a spectral consciousness and the paradox of his passion: one can never wholly possess the mind of another or the sounds of a shared past. The objectification of Albertine as a Venetian glass vase is associative and metonymic, both Proutsian tropes which envision Albertine as an ‘obstacle, interposed between [him] and all things’ because she for him is ‘their container’, a human membrane between the exterior world, her existence serving as a filter, as it was ‘from her alone, as from a vase’ that Proust could retrieve or accept information. Once that ‘vase was shattered’, he ‘no longer [had] the courage to grasp things’(Proust, Pg 482, 1913). The thematic and filmic foundation of Albertine is one of entrapment, presenting an installation of the vibrational capture and re-staging of a time and place, allowing an audience to dwell in those realms for a while longer, granted a durational extension by way of the sonic.
Albertine presents a record of abstracted static of radio and water rather than direct sonic postcards of site, with the intention of arresting a lost time.Albertine installs a sonic impression of place, in the form of ‘hyper-memory installation’ which refers to specific composing, or in this case curatorial, practice which reconfigures field recordings, or ‘reenactments of past events or any narrative documentation that deals with documentation of the past in society’ (Chavez, 2012), generative of hyper-mnemonic compositions.
