Relative silence at dawn: beepblip, Tisa Neža Herlec, Lina Rica
FriFormA\V and the 24th International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns present the pre-festival audio-visual event
Relative Silence at Dawn is an ambient situation in which field recordings, computer-generated sound, a voice, and live-generated video stretch over longtime intervals, creating a space for quiet sequences and monotonous pulsations. The performers create a generative organic/synthetic feedback loop between sound, video and voice. Thinking about silence was triggered on a winter field recording trip on the edge of an ancient forest near Kočevska Reka. The sound of frozen winter silence is static, unchanging and solitary, as well as unfathomably persistent, enduring and serene. Accepting such conditions was especially relevant in times of social isolation.
The audiovisual event follows the mood of solitude and perseverance, two opposite poles of silence. Such silence shifts the responsibility for music production from composition to listeners who become audible to themselves, and their bodies become part of the music. The formless silence takes shape when it is inhabited by listeners who have just left the city rumble and walked into a space of their noise.
During the preparation of the project, we visited an anechoic chamber and an underground cave to experiment with how silence affects our listening. We concluded that silence is not the absence of sound but is the sound we have learned to ignore; it is a sound that is either too monotonous and stretched or constantly present as a low-frequency murmur of a city or a high-frequency pitch of fluids in the body. Silence is about listening to small and insignificant sounds. It can be loud just as noise can be quiet. It differs from noise in that it does not paralyse the body but includes it in its production similarly to an anechoic chamber.
Posebna zahvala: Zavod Sektor, Mauricio Valdés san Emeterio (Kulturno izobraževalno društvo Pina, Koper).
Ida Hiršenfelder
Ida Hiršenfelder (beepblip) is a sound artist and archivist. She makes immersive bleepy psychogeographical soundscapes with analogue electronics, DIY and modular synths, field recordings and computer manipulations. She is interested in bioacoustics, experimental music and sound spatialisation. She is a member of the Jata C group for bioacoustics and sound ecologies. Her solo albums Noise for Strings, Vol. 1 (2019) and Noise for Strings, Vol. 2 (2020) were published by the Kamizdat label. She studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (2021–23).
Web: https://beepblip.org/
Tisa Neža Herlec
Tisa Neža Herlec (Rotterdam, 1996) communicates, organises, writes, performs and creates imaginaries (with sound, voice, texts and images). Collaboration, processuality and the friction between structures ignite her inspiration. She is a thinker and a practitioner of the praxis of improvisation, exploring its emancipatory potential. She obtained her master’s diploma in Experimental Publishing at PZI in Rotterdam and her bachelor’s in painting at the ALUO in Ljubljana. She performs, exhibits, organises and publishes around Europe. https://tisa.world/
Lina Rica
Born in 1980, LINA RICA is an intermedia artist working with video, graphics, photography, animation, and sound. Her work explores social processes of past and present worlds and their effects on individuals. In 2008, she completed her studies in printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
She has received several awards for her printmaking, which is included in collections such as MGLC, Oficina Arara, Critical Mass, and Femicomix Portfolio. Between 2012 and 2016, she co-ran the GaleRica gallery and contemporary art production collective in Makarska. She has performed video art at numerous festivals, clubs, and autonomous cultural centers, collaborating with various artists. Since 2019, she has been part of the experimental audiovisual ensemble Marta Fakuch, and since 2020, she has been a member of the audiovisual trio Etceteral. She lives and works in Ljubljana. / https://linarica.com
