Together with architect and researcher Alexander Furunes Eriksson and sound artist and researcher Carolina Jinde, we held a two-part online presentation at the Alliances and Commonalities conference, organized as a hybrid event due to pandemic restrictions.
The first part of the presentation took place on the first day of the conference. We, along with our moderator Rebecca Hilton, first read letters we had sent to each other. Then we realized a practical experiment with the participants, asking them to sense their environment, write some sentences about it and then read them aloud and record them, and finally send the recording to us.
Before the second part of the presentation on the final day of the conference, Carolina edited an audio work from the materials we had received from the participants. In the session we listened to this work and had a discussion.
The inspiration for our presentations came from the involuntary isolation and the fact that we were far apart from each other. We thought that by composing something from these separate sensuous environments, we could create a virtual site, which we could share, an elsewhere. The concept was adopted from Finnish researcher Harri Mäcklin, who described immersive experiences of artworks as going elsewhere (Mäcklin 2018).
It was an attempt to respond to the condition of having no onsite gatherings and finding ways to refute distance and create a shared space for our collective body when there was none available.
Listen to the Elsewhere in Carolina Jinde’s dissertation: Enhear (Jinde 2022, accessed in 24.1.2025), Chapter 2.
P a r a s p a t i a l r e s o n a n c e
In Drafts 16, 19, 20 and 21 I dealt with the issue of a scattered audience body in the pandemic condition, which separated us from each other and made a shared resonant space impossible to attain. In this draft, Carolina, Alex and I tried however to attain it, to create a resonant space for a collective body when it seemed almost impossible.
If in the previous draft the experience of a collective body was dependent on belief, since the gathering was spatially fragmented, in this one spatial fragmentation was bridged by the attempt to create a para-space that would alleviate the feeling of covid-induced separation. The participants were already connected via a conference call, even if they could sense each other only as rectangles and names on the screen. The task, which we gave them, aimed at a sharing of sensed space through articulations of each embodied experience. Editing together the audio materials submitted by the participants made them resonate with each other, making their (and our) bodies resonant by extension.