Event Venue
Reuterstr. 7, 12053 Berlin
Familiar Signals is the title of an installation of sound and text works by Sybella Perry made together with her father and her sister, over a period of nine months whilst coming to terms with a traumatic accident that affected the family. The works draw on sounding and listening as a means to create and share spaces of intimacy and inter-subjectivity. The artist uses tonality to contrast familiar occurrences and unexpected events, both in music and in everyday encounters.
In twelve steps is a quadrophonic composition resulting from the repeated realisations of a score developed in collaboration with the artist’s father, a folk musician and accordionist. The score uses twelve pitches and twelve instructions for improvisation as a duo. In four poems in sororal stereo the artist and her sister read aloud poems describing moments of environmental change occurring in familiar places. The likeness and difference in tonality of their voices playing out across the stereo-field, the voices do not stay fixed, but move in position from left to right while each of the voices also mimics the nuances of the other.
For the installation at Centrum both works have been adapted to fit the particular acoustic qualities of the space. Four poems in sororal stereo can be listened to outside in the small courtyard garden, the voices intersecting with the ambient sounds of birdsong and conversations of the neighbours. In twelve steps in turn has been arranged to incorporate the existing reverberation of the tiled space into the composition, allowing time for the sound to build and decay, offering a different listening experience from each position in the space.
Familiar Signals is Centrum’s contribution as a satellite of this year’s 48 Hours Neukölln Festival.
