Kathrin Lambert (*1987) is an artist living in Saarbrücken (GER). Besides her art, she works in the field of event and cultural management as well as a media designer. One of her most significant projects at the moment is the organization of the sound art festival EXPERIMANCE.
Since the beginning of her academic education, she focused on the field of sound art. The emphasis is on dealing with everyday objects and everyday noises, and the reaction to those available structures. With her installations she ties in with architectural elements, picks them up and tries to use existing energies. During the production of her sound objects or instruments, she combines things and materials such as household objects or building materials. In performances, the artist interacts with these objects and instruments and creates sound atmospheres by recording the produced sounds with different microphones and then looping them. With field recordings, Kathrin Lambert takes on new and unknown places in particular and creating new ways of dealing with them. The recordings are then used in live sets or her installations.
During her time in Bangalore, the artist will engage with the new unfamiliar soundscapes of a different cultural context and collect situations sonically in order to incorporate them into her archive as well as to process them further. Likewise, new sound objects or instruments with reference to the city, region or culture are to be created and used in performances. Kathrin Lambert is inspired here especially by the new environment and its specific local household objects and traditional musical instruments
Final report
During the residency I was able to devote myself completely to creating art and to developing a new work in cooperation with my host. It was important for me to deal with the local conditions as well as to establish a relation to cultural aspects of everyday life. Thus, on the one hand, my work as a sound artist consisted of documenting and recording the soundscape, which was completely new to me, primarily by sonically recording my everyday life with its world of noise. On the other hand, I have been able to further deepen my working approach "Femme au Foyer", which I have been pursuing since 2015. This approach, which deals with the use of everyday and household objects as instruments, could be elaborated through artistic research at markets. Thus I examined everyday objects such as brushwood brooms or dishes for their sonic potential and let these and other utensils flow into my created works. Due to the openness and the interest that I encountered in Bangalore, performances as a DJane also resulted.
In the following I would like to briefly describe what emerged:
Performances & Concerts:
05.11.2022 Sound Performance "Wetspace Noise Drip" Walkin Studios, IND
18.11.2022 Sound Performance with Amith Venkataramaiah, The ISRO, Bangalore, IND
26.11.2022 DJ-set, Party 3.0, BiraTaproom, Bangalore, IND
27.11.2022 DJ-set, RhythmXchange, Indian Music Experience, Bangalore, IND
13.12.2022 Sound Performance, Forplay Society, Kochi, IND
03.12.2022 DJ Set, Guru CIRCUS@Bira Taproom, Bangalore IND
09.12.2022 Exhibition & Noise Improvisation with Kathrin Lambert, Upendra Vadaddi & Amith Venkataramaiah, Attakkalari, Bangalore IND
A selection of conventional kitchen utensils is turned into a self-playing sound object with the help of small electronics. Metal bowls were mainly used for this purpose. On the technical level, the sound objects consist of several Arduino minicomputers and light sensors that control the individual elements. By moving electromagnets, the metal bowls are struck and thus produce sound. The programming allows every single element to be controlled.
SOUND!OK!HORN
Sound installation: Field recordings, Loudspeaker
Site-specific and everyday sounds of the city are combined into a surreal sound collage and brought into a new context in interaction. The created composition, which mainly contains sounds of the urban soundscape of the city of Bangalore, was brought into the stairwell of Attakkalari Dance Studio through small loudspeakers. The glass front of the staircase created an ambivalent relationship between the artificially-created composition in the interior and the existing soundscape of the urban exterior through its transparency.
In the jam session with artist Amith Venkataramaiah, objects and materials that characterise the image of the markets in Bangalore and are available in abundance were used as analog sound generators. On the one hand, mundane tools or household objects were used, to which a new value was attributed through selection. On the other hand, ritual objects were integrated whose symbolic character was neutralised by a new contextualisation. Themes such as religion or hyper consumption are touched upon using the materials and processed in a poetic-abstract fashion.