ECLAT 6

skull ark, upturned with no mast (2017–18)

music and concept: Clara Iannotta
architecture: Anna Kubelik
lighting design: Eva G. Alonso
sound technology: Chris Swithinbank

Performance
Karin Hellqvist, Emma Iannotta, Truike van der Poel, Johanna Zimmer

Co-production Munich Biennale and Musik der Jahrhunderte Stuttgart

»We should watch music and listen to the theatre.« Fascinated by Luciano Berio’s thesis and the idea of music as a multisensory experience, Clara Iannotta developed instruments that enable an interaction of visual and sound. In order to take up the theme »private matter« of the Munich Biennale, she designed a space in which she could combine the liveliness of an audiovisual instrument with the experience of being enclosed. And she discovered a wonderfully parable-like natural phenomenon: the symbiotic relationship of the deep-sea Venus’ Flower Basket with a pair of shrimps. As larvae flushed through the fine tissue into the interior of the sponge, the shrimps, growing larger, can no longer escape and spend their entire long shrimp marriage life protected from all dangers, but trapped and invisible to the outside world in the sponge. The picture shows one aspect of our present: people who spend their lives behind screens, trapped in a virtual reality that enables them to act without exposing themselves. Transforming this image into music, Clara Iannotta wants to gradually reveal this »struggle for life« to outsiders through a subtle and sensitive sound-light-shadow dramaturgy.