02 > 11.03.2024 | Contrepoint – Rafael (Be/Kr) – media arts residency | Transcultures Hautrage (Be)

The multimedia artist Rafael, working between Liège and Seoul, is hosted in residence at Transcultures to develop his new installation project “Contrepoint”. He developed the basic principle during his participation in the exhibition “Transfer / 갈아타다: Korean and British abstract painting and the digital document”, which took place last year at the Korean Cultural Center UK in London where a multitude of voices/people, filmed beforehand, described a painting.

This time, a group made up of people chosen at random will be asked to describe a sound. Ironically, the words spoken by these people to describe this sound, by mixing and intertwining, will themselves become inaudible and will in turn form a random polyphony.

The word will be reduced here to what it is: a sound. By aggregating with each other, these fused words/sounds will ultimately compose an abstract symphony.

This work will also deal with the impossibility and futility of wanting to describe, in this codified medium that is language, the emotional and singular resonance that a simple sound can provoke in a person.

How to imagine a sound through words? What do we lose in this translation? What do we win ? In this process, the use of words to define something abstract, such as a sound, itself becomes abstract.