INDISCREET CHIRPING: Sound as a spatial amplifier
QUIDAMes: Anne-Sophie de Visscher (artist), Petra Pferdmenges (architect)
& Darine Choueiri (architect, urbanist).
The installation: Indiscreet chirping seeks to reveal a place through sound. Sound powerfully triggers in the collective memory an “image of a place”. A song, an ambulant merchant’s call, city noise, or birds chirping… bring instantly to our mind, an image of the place we associate to it.
In this intervention, Indiscreet Chirping, we are bringing to the hidden patio of the Art Centre: Experimentem, in Barcelona, the sound of birds’ chirping. The passerby is attracted by the chirping flowing out of an anodyne and opaque facade. He is invited to visit the inside of the building. Once in, he finds himself in the inner patio surrounded by the singing of invisible mediterranean birds.
Birds are considered as reminiscence of the patio, a common architectural feature in Mediterranean cities. They transform the existing place into the magical container of an architectural imagery for a while: the enclosed haven.
Apart from the surrounding sound, two headphones hang from the central trees like nests. The visitor can also sit in a rocking chair, to listen intimately to the chirping of the birds. This evasion amplifies the patio’s spatiality: the experienced space appeals to the origins of the urban garden; an enclosed paradise, and act as a reminder of the variegated typology of places, in the Mediterranean city of Barcelona.
An exhibition followed the installation, presenting the 5 species of the chirping Mediterranean birds: the Wood warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix), Common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), Common blackbird (Turdus merula), Golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus) and the Rufous-throated solitaire (Myadestes genibarbis).