Soundtracks
Soundtracks is about remembering sounds. Everyday of our lives we are confronted with sounds. They set the tone, the atmosphere for our daily lives. Yet when we remember the important moments of our lives, we never remember the sound. Our mind just doesn’t work that way. We can close our eyes and picture the moment before us, but when asked to do the same with sound, things become more difficult. Sound works much more insidious, and when asked to remember a sound, to recreate it in our heads, we have to rely a lot more on our imagination, our crosslinks between feelings, thoughts and memories to attempt to hear it again. And by using that imagination, we explore what it was that made a certain sound special to us, and why it stuck with us.
Sound is a sense of touch. Our eardrum feels the vibrations of the world. And it’s a sense of touch directly wired into the brain. That’s why sound is so personal. Thus collecting the memories of sound is exploring a personal history. Following the traces, the tracks a sound left in our mind, in our identity.
Soundtracks attempts to bring these personal histories together in an archive. The walls of a room are lined with wooden shelves. On the shelves stand jars with little pieces of paper, with other people’s memories on them. Visitors are invited to open the jars and dive in to the memories. In the middle stands a little table, and there visitors are invited to leave their own memories, to become part of the archive. What happens if we make the act of remembering them an active request, when we actively and conciously dig into our own memory? What kind of history do we create?
Sound is a sense of touch. Our eardrum feels the vibrations of the world. And it’s a sense of touch directly wired into the brain. That’s why sound is so personal. Thus collecting the memories of sound is exploring a personal history. Following the traces, the tracks a sound left in our mind, in our identity.
Soundtracks attempts to bring these personal histories together in an archive. The walls of a room are lined with wooden shelves. On the shelves stand jars with little pieces of paper, with other people’s memories on them. Visitors are invited to open the jars and dive in to the memories. In the middle stands a little table, and there visitors are invited to leave their own memories, to become part of the archive. What happens if we make the act of remembering them an active request, when we actively and conciously dig into our own memory? What kind of history do we create?
Pictures by Sam Vanoverschelde
Soundtracks has been exhibited at NIMk, Amsterdam (NL), Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels (BE) and cultural center De Leest in Izegem (BE). However, Soundtracks is an continually growing archive. So I would like to invite you too to become part of the archive, to discover your own sonic memories. Please, take a seat and search your memory. Try to remember a sound that was special and describe it for me. Write it down for me on a piece of paper. And snailmail / post it to me on this address:
Soundtracks
Hopstraat 40
1000 Brussels
BELGIUM
Hopstraat 40
1000 Brussels
BELGIUM
Ps: and just to avoid any misunderstanding: I need HANDWRITTEN MEMORIES, so please, no email or typed letters. For the rest, you are completely free to use whichever form or language you like. Thank you in advance.