⤶

“Vartan Avakian’s installation takes two manifestations, a sculptural piece at BAC and a sonic spectre along the river banks. The project translates the sound waves produced by the flow of water into radio waves that are transmitted to the environs of the river. It captures and make palpable, so to speak, a sound that has been lost by urban development: that of the Beirut river, now hidden behind the walls of a concrete watershed. The watershed had transformed the river from an uncontrollable flow of energy to mere infrastructure, that subdues the river and reduces the sonic resonance of its flow. The act of ‘ghosting’ the sound of the river through live transmission over radio waves renders Avakian’s sonic movement a gesture of resistance rather than documentation.”

“[Vartan Avakian’s] intervention in the framework of Tandem-Works, stems from a desire to understand the relationship between matter and movement, as well as water’s rapport with the natural as well as the urban realm. In his piece, Avakian wants to make audible the sounds of the river in its different environs. […] For the artist, the sound of the water interacting with other matter is a direct consequence of how the city built the watershed, and while water flowing might mirror an unpredictable, indeterminate wave of sounds, the artist asks us and wants the piece itself to surrender to this unpredictability. The concepts of unpredictability and risk are important economic terms in today’s reigning capitalist era. Avakian is interested in how economic risk calculation is intrinsically linked to our fears of unpredictability. It is in this resistance – our need and obsession to control and predict (hear, produce) nature – that the artist’s piece comes to life. Just as the concrete watershed helps transport the flow of water from one place to the next, the composition of the piece emulates this by transporting the sound of the water flow to specified points in its surroundings. Pedestrians and visitors alike will be able to listen to the river from specific points, where the sound of water is transported via external pipelines. By doing so, the artist points to the absent-present spectre of the river.”