TEKTON
⎮multi-channel sound composition + installation + scanography based video animation
mineral - soma - sonic body
dry garden of sound-carrying stones
stone instrument
TEKTON is a stone instrument, a mineral-soma-sonic body, a dry garden of sound-carrying stones. At the core of the poetic research process is the hybridity of human and stone with the elemental, subhuman sonority and the appearance of stones as solid substance. In view of the disintegration of the anthropocentric understanding and occupation of the world, which is changing drastically before our present ears, and the ever louder intimate intuition that beneath the unimaginable variety of life forms necessarily hides the lush life of minerals, we need to ask ourselves: »Do we understand what kind of dysregulation human is producing while massively extracting minerals from the planet? When our bodies lack minerals, there are instant serious consequences, echoing in all layers of health.«
Minerals invent themselves again and again over the aeons, they build themselves in constellations, create and disintegrate into shapes, textures and dimensions, they vibrate and resonate and through existence materialize, metabolise, (re)create, build long-lasting, seemingly immobile and unchanging forms, as well as more short-lived, even fleeting forms of life.
Minerals are consistent in predicting the future > transformation, change is a cosmic constant. Human-stone hybridity is an auto-poetic principle, it is an ancient, mutual attraction, a philia that builds human and stone bodies. We build our world with stones (even nowadays with digital virtuality there is again mineral at the core of electronics). Stone and minerals build the human body. Human is (only) a fleeting constellation of minerals. The stony, mineral materiality of existence is the ubiquitous subterranean domain. It is the subject of the metabolism of the planetary-cosmic organism. Minerals and stones are active agents in the co-shaping of the human physical appearance, and likewise the stone is a co-participator in the shaping of the subtler realities of human: mental, psychic, sensual, emotional … And vice versa. Stone is not a solitary substance, it is a networked, mycelial substance - a field full of movement and galactic connections.
TEKTON is structure, it is texture, it is text and textuality; it is a too slow fluidity to be observed with the naked eye, except when it enters “our" time.
The individual sources of the multi-channel sound composition I created from sound material recorded in the territories from where the stones were taken - the Lobnica river in Pohorje, the cave in Studenice, the Nadiža river, Strunjan Bay and the Adriatic Sea, recordings of tectonics in different parts of the world. Individual sound sources includes performative field recording, voice and poetry, recording of substances (hydrophone, geophone, contact microphone: rivers, sea, rocks, earth, tectonics, atmosphere and others), sonification of scanned images of stones, sound processing, composing and deep cosmic eavesdropping as a central creative process. The individual sonority is played back into the same stone. In the sonic process, a resonant feedback loop is created, the amplification of sound to the level of matter (and human audibility), and back. In the foreground is the resonance and vibration of sound and solid matter. Stones as resonators.
The TEKTON project is situated in the author's poetic exploration of the elements and the "cosmic garden": earth, water, air, fire, ether > this time mainly in the relationship between stones and the human body, in the exploration of the body in relation to the strange other, to stones, to specific geo-choreographies of the body in elementary environments. The author is actively flirting with the search for cosmic impulses and ways of loosening the anthropocentric orientation of modern civilization.
Premier at the gallery K18, Kulturni inkubator, Maribor, November 21 - December 4 2022