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Inversions

Annie Mahtani

Inversions has been performed in Bangor, Birmingham, Bogotá, Brussels, Gothenburg, Montpellier, Sheffield and Stockholm…

Inversions began as a live improvisatory piece in 2014 to be performed alongside Néle Azevedo’s Minimum Monument project in Birmingham (England, UK).

Minimum Monument is an open-air exhibition displaying 5000 figures made of ice, inverting the official canons of the monument as, in Azevedo’s words: “in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral ice; in the place of the monumental scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies. Thousands of small sculptures of ice are placed in public space. The memory is inscribed in the photographic image and shared by everyone. It is no longer reserved to great heroes nor to great monuments. It loses its static condition to gain fluidity in the urban displacement and in the change of state of the water. It concentrates small sculptures of small men, the common men.”

The sound material was recorded during the exhibition’s two-week creation period; an intensive production line of delicate sculpting, chiselling and freezing. The fragility of the solitary figures transforms into a majestic army as the microscopic sounds of each sculpture multiply in their thousands.

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Inversions was realized in 2015 at the Electroacoustic Music Studios of the University of Birmingham (England, UK) and premiered on May 1, 2015 during the BEAST FEaST festival in Birmingham. The initial improvisation (for Minimum Monument) was commissioned by Birmingham Hippodrome. Special thanks to Néle Azevedo.

Premiere

  • May 1, 2015, BEAST FEaST 2015: Concert 3, Elgar Concert Hall — Bramall Music Building — University of Birmingham, Birmingham (England, UK)

Details

Inversions (2015), 9:26
24-channel fixed medium

Calendar

Broadcasts

Date Work Programme
January 24, 2021 Annie Mahtani, Inversions (2015), 9:26 Episode 1048 / Martian Gardens Podcast (USA)