08 Jun Julia Eckhardt
Residency Program November 2022
During her residency at the Centro Negra, she has been dividing her time between two projects, one more theoretical for which she wrote and read, and one more practical which involved improvisation on her instrument and a daily protocol for walking, recording and playing.
The theoretical research is an investigation on the notion of quality in music: in its current way to use it, it reflects the binary construction of our Western societies, in which judgments of “good” or “bad” became instruments of power serving to in- or exclude. Criteria stay opaque and keep shifting, and aren’t up for arguments. However, refraining from judgement is not a good alternative to this situation, because judging is a fundamental political activity within a society, and an important instrument for building a culture. What she wants to develop is a method of judgement which values subjectivity, context, and the specificity of the sonic in cultural mediation. During her time here in Blanca, she concentrated on the role of technology, and specifically the image of the cyborg or robot, which has allowed women and people of colour to circumvent expectations from the establishment, and in which popular musical styles have played an important role and gained considerable power.
For her artistic project, she started from the wish to connect to the place and phenomenal landscape around Centro Negra on one hand and to dive into musical improvisation on the other — in which she found surprising parallels. Initially also because she wanted to structure the big amount of precious time during this residency, she gave herself a simple daily protocol: she would walk into an unknown direction for 30 minutes, make a field recording and take a photo of a detail there. Upon return, she would make an improvisation stemming from the energy she had perceived at that completely random spot where she had stopped. Those are three ways of producing memory. She often felt awkward in the beginning: not knowing where she would go, in this overwhelming landscape, which is so different from her usual metropolitan habitat. Here around Blanca, straight lines are rare to see, the sonic is wide and often empty, and the mountains make the acoustic very specific. Both during her walks and the daily improvisations, she came to enjoy whatever comes next and unexpectedly, the small coincidences and accidents which trigger new perspectives and ideas.
Residency supported by the Flemish Government – Vlaanderen/Verbeelding werkt.
Julia Eckhardt, 2022/11