From toadfish grunts in Panama or the sound of the Caribbean’s coral
reefs to the melting icebergs in the fjords of Greenland, Jana Winderen records
the soundscapes of lesser-known worlds to create compositions played in a live multichannel environment
or as immersive sound installations. The Norwegian artist believes the emotive power of
sounds has the ability to make us aware of how human activity compromises the
environment, and notes, “I’m concerned about how human beings are leaving very
little space for other creatures on the planet, and also how we are occupying
all of the planet with our sounds; even at the North Pole, I’ve found human
sounds.”
Recently, Winderen travelled to Le Brassus, in the Valley du Joux,
Switzerland, the home of watchmaker Audemars Piguet, which had commissioned her
to work on its annual Origin project, where artists create works that offer
their interpretations of the company’s cultural and geographical origins.
She spent several days around the Lac de Joux, recording fish, insects,
the wind passing through the branches of the 300-year-old evergreen
forest, but recalls finding it
almost
impossible
even in this relatively isolated setting to make recording of the
local environment without a
constant flow of human created sounds: “It may look beautiful in the
photograph, but when you put on the headphones and listen without filtering out
the noise in your brain that you’ve learned to filter out automatically, the
sounds of constant airplanes from Geneva, commuter traffic even early in the
morning, trains; I would only find a small window of 30 minutes early in the
morning, without human noises.”
Following two short-residencies in Le Brassus, Winderen create a symphonic collage
of interwoven sound layers of the environment including human
activities, which was presented as a sound installation in the watchmaker’s
lounge at Art Basel in Basel 2019, while outside the fair, the artist also held two live performances at
the House of Electronic Arts Basel, using that rich tapestry of sounds.
Olivia Giuntini, Audemars
Piguet’s Chief Branding Officer, notes the project was typical of Audemars
Piguet’s commitment to work with artists “who have an uncompromising vision of
nature,” something that she points out is also encoded in the brand. “We know
what we owe to nature, and all of the artists that we are commissioning also have
that respect for nature,” she says, adding, “In watchmaking there is always
this link between the visible and invisible. It’s a theme you also find in the
works of some of the sound artists we’ve chosen, like Jana.”
“Supporting the
arts is another way to tell of our roots, and to pay tribute to Le Brassus and
where we come from. But it’s also a way of inspiring AP. We see our patronage
as a win-win relationship; it makes us think, it inspires us, and it can even
have an impact on how we work,” Giuntini says, adding the company chooses
artists who are “forward thinking and who are pushing the boundaries of what is
feasible.”
Audemars Piguet
entered the contemporary art world with a bang in 2013 - the year it became an
Associate Partner of Art Basel - by
supporting the installation of ‘Curiosity’ by Kolkoz (the moniker for the
conceptual duo Samuel Boutruche and Benjamin Morea), a full-size
inflatable snow-covered chalet, complete with faux fireplace inside, on
the Biscayne Bay of Miami. Facing the waterside modernist-looking Marine
Stadium, the incongruous installation offered a surreal moment under the sun,
while reminding them of the Swiss Jura origin of the watchmaker
Since then,
Audemars Piguet has been steadily deepening its involvement with contemporary
art. On top of commissioning its so-called “Origin Projects” to showcase in its
collector lounge at the three Art Basel fairs around the world, the watchmaker
also launched in 2014 the Audemars Piguet Art Commission, giving an artist
and curator carte blanche each year to realize an artwork that embodies themes
of complexity and precision to align with the DNA of the brand. The first
commission, unveiled at Art Basel 2015, was an ambitious installation by Swiss
artist and composer Robin Meier. Titled Synchronicity, the work investigated the
spontaneous emergence of cycles in nature, with live fireflies and crickets
featuring alongside computers and electromagnetic pendulums. And last year, the
watchmaker commissioned Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) to create HALO,
a work exploring sounds produced by data from particle-collision experiments
taking place at the CERN.
“Art opens our eyes
to something that is not related to our core metier, which is watch crafting; it
opens us to the world around it, nature, technology, it can help us move
forward,” she says, adding that the brand also finds inspiration in the artworks.
For example, Meier’s Synchronicity prompted the watchmaker to rethink about how
to better work together and led to an internal project, also called
synchronicity, “which is a new way of working within the company.”
Separately to these
annual commissions, Audemars Piguet also continues to support special art
projects, the latest being a new work by
Japanese electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda, who focuses on the
essential characteristics of sound and light by means of mathematical precision
and aesthetics.
Ikeda presented the
first part of his new Data-verse (2019), a sonic and visual experience, at the
Venice Biennale’s May You Live in Interesting Times exhibition. The Paris-based
artist transformed a massive set of scientific data, collected from open
sources such as CERN, NASA and the Human Genome Project, into a composition of
computer-generated images and an electronic soundtrack.
Ikeda and Audemars
Piguet’s collaboration will continue in Tokyo in October, with the unveiling of
the second part of the Data-verse trilogy, with the final part concluding in
2020.
For the brand, the
artistry in Ikeda’s work aligns with its own creativity and drive for
innovation with Olivier Audemars, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors,
pointing out, “Ikeda’s work allows us to see the world differently and
understand the many layers that make up our universe, particularly the
intersections between the arts and sciences.”
Giuntini adds, “Complexity
and precision is core to the haute horlogerie. So it’s another way to tell the
story of craftsmanship behind the watches.”
“Beyond the
watches, what is driving us is the way we believe in talent, and how they are
going to move the world. That’s at the core of who we are, and that also has an
impact on the artist we choose,” Guintini explains, “Especially for the AP
Art commission, we choose curators who put forward artists that we
believe will change something for the world, either has an ecological impact,
or a research impact, whatever can bring something new.”
“The notion of
talent and what they can bring to the world is at the core of what we are doing
now,” she says, adding that going forward the brand wants to raise the level of
knowledge of its staff about art so that they can communicate better about the
artworks on display in the brand’s “touch points” with clients, be it at the
collector booth, in its AP Houses (a non-transactional space were the
brand invites its clients in another way to present the brand) or the upcoming
museum that it will open in Le Brassus in April 2020.
This Story first appear in A: A First Of magazine (September edition)
This Story first appear in A: A First Of magazine (September edition)