Eero Yli-Vakkuri & Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen "Safety as Ambience" (2021)
This performance critically investigates whether public safety can be sensed as a specific ambience, manifested by certain sounds and gestures. It regards the city as a site of cohabitation, signified by moving bodies which maintain an awareness of each other through noise. This soundscape constructs a milieu which designates meaning to individuals passing through it and affords the formulation of particular groups. These meanings are thus negotiated through their implementation in the cityscape, where even arbitrary patterns appear through their various manifestations and connotations. Link to protocol
The artists will amplify and perform in relation to sound sources which constitute the soundscape of a specific site in Helsinki, the Tripla Mall and Railroad Station in Pasila. Through this engagement, movements resonate safety, care, and nourishment - and the sounds found are communicating, and even alarming, what happens both visibly and invisibly in other parts of the mall and railroad construction.
Some crucial questions are asked - how do these sounds contribute to the public's sense of safety and how can spaces be reclaimed and controlled through different means of enunciation and through the use of sound? How do we activate and absorb these sounds through our encounter with them and how is a sense of safety (re)established through our bodies’ movements?
The performance started outside, at the entrance of the Tripla Mall and Railway Station in Pasila at 10 am Friday morning (September 24. 2021). Collectively we moved to the performance sites. Th audience was asked to help with documentation of the performance. The duration was approximately 40 minutes. Later on the same day, from 17:00 to 19:00, Tina and Eero were hosting an informal listening session in the Third Space Gallery.