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Background Radiation - Part I, The History of Spain

Site-Specific Sound installation. JustMad Art Fair. Madrid, February 2014.

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There we no longer recognise the individuality of the original. What we receive on the shore is the resonance of all these different events, as if they were all happening at the same time and in the same place. We experience history as an event taking place here and now, while we ourselves throw stones into the lake.

• Background Radiation - Concept

This series of works is about the idea of history - history as a simultaneous manifestation of events.
On a lake, three different stones hit three different points on the surface at three different moments. These stones create three individual waves, which gradually collide with each other and eventually reach the shore as a single wave. We, standing on the shore, can only recognise this singular wave, which embodies three distant events radiating from different spaces and times. Like the three stones and the singular wave, history is an accumulation of the collision of individual events that manifests itself to us as the singular event. Different events that take place at different times and places and that have nothing to do with each other, at some point begin to resonate with each other and create a unified event.

This is a case study of the Background Radiation project, referring to a specific place, situation and history - Spain.
Sounds from the most important historical events to everyday life are layered and compressed into an auditory event. We experience all the events simultaneously, without hierarchy, beyond time and space.

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