Shanghai
Xu Cheng | Gregorio Samsaro
The reason why I choose ruins is because I think that the ruins are everywhere they're all around us. But nobody looks at them actually. Also, the cityscape changes all the time in Shanghai. So, I try to record these buildings before they are destroyed or changed.
First of all, it wasn't to record the sounds in the ruins but I wanted to use the sounds that I had collected in the city many years ago and have it reproduced in the ruins. So this was actually by using digital technology to reproduce the whole spatial sense and resonance of the ruins.
Behind the scenes
Xu Cheng
Xu Cheng (*1980) is a sound artist based in Shanghai and a practitioner and organizer of sound activities. He dabbles in experimental music, improvisation, electronic music and so forth. Apart from the music ontology, Xu is also interested in the interaction between sound and social spaces and its behaviors and manifestations. Xu works with varied forms of sound art: installations, experimental music, performances and theatre.Gregorio Samsaro
Gregorio Samsaro is a photographer of dereliction with a focus on eschatological sociology of urban ruination, architectural geography of kali yuga, and the microhistorical documentation and haphazard visual narration of forgotten human travail and inhuman decay.Also, a cat daddy.
Concept
While a chamber itself doesn’t make any sound, space can largely alter and shape the sounds you hear. The main intention of this project is to dissolve the spatial dimension of isolation as well as the temporal dimension of isolation.About ten years ago the sound artist Xu Cheng had been continuously recording urban soundscapes in various areas of Shanghai. In other words, sounds that are already isolated from their initial time. The other artist in this project, Gregorio Samsaro, focuses on the photographical discovery of places in the city that have been separated from humanity and become ruins, in other words motifs that are spatially isolated. In this art work Xu Cheng samples the resonance and reverberation structure of these ruined spaces and re-injects the 'isolated' sound from the past into the present of the isolated ruins through digital technology.
The project is not intended to restore an original urban audiovisual soundscape, but rather to reconstruct a virtual experience with the senses and memories by breaking down this double isolation in a state of ambiguity. This experience comes from the respective urban experiences of both artists, but also floats aimlessly outside the current urban life.
