KOCHI:
When German artist Lisa Premke pedalled through the streets of Kochi in a thoughtful and leisurely manner, she hoped to explore the sounds of the town— from the drips of rain in the Kerala monsoon, to the chime of temple bells, to the blaring horns of boats from the harbor.
At a different level, Premke was also trying to explore the voice of objects and spaces to personify collective losses – the loss of a community, of cultural heritage, and how the city experiences ‘a constant fluctuation’.
Premke’s work with acoustics, sounds, and cultural landscape is part of an ongoing residency project of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) at Pepper House.
A Let’s Talk session with the artist on her installation “Singing Patterns”, will be held on September 8 at 5:30 pm in Pepper House and her work will be showcased on September 7 and 8.
Premke’s work involves taking apart discarded systems, whether it is abandoned industries, or failed political systems, or the deconstruction of language, and reinterpreting them as acoustic objects and site-specific installations. In particular, Premke is interested in perceptions of “absence” and “intimacy”, experimenting with the lines between familiar and completely unknown situations.
“Working in Kerala was really interesting as I normally work in places that are remote and isolated and try to explore the kind of losses that shape the community or society in a cultural heritage. I chose Kerala due to its uniqueness in holding various communities and cultures together in the same place,” says the artist.
Premke says she can hear sound in everything that she sees. She was in Fort Kochi during the monsoon and the sound of the rain chains so fascinated her that she started working with it. Her installation will include plastic, unstained steel, and aluminium, to create various notes on the “instrument”.
Premke remarks that one of the most influential parts of her residency was the studio at Pepper House. “There are people constantly, but there is a lot of nature and a huge harbour on the other side. I hear the birds fighting on one side of the room, and the boats making loud, blaring sounds on its emblematic of Kochi, because it combines everything. People come from all the other. It reminds me of the constant fluctuation of the things here. For me different languages and countries, so I hear everything that is so mixed here. Every opening has a different sound,” says Premke.
The artist has been part of the Pepper House Residency for the past month, exploring the area and creating work as response. She is in India as part of the bangaloREsidency programme of the Goethe-Institut, Bangalore.
Her installation will also be shown at the residency show parallel to the Fourth edition of Kochi- Muziris Biennale, which gets underway on December 12.
