"Rapture" by Camille Norment (Norway) in the Nordic Pavilion
Camille Norment’s Rapture, a strange, tense installation that takes the piercing, resonant tones of the glass harmonica as a starting point to explore the duality of violence and peace, action and repose at the Nordic Pavilion. Featuring the otherworldly space of the pavilion prominently, the architecture is adorned with speakers playing a churning, high-pitched composition, in contrast with broken glass and debris littered across the rooms of the show.
the Oslo-based artist works with the glass armonica – an 18th-century instrument invented by Benjamin franklin that creates ethereal music from the touch of fingers on glass and water – and a chorus of 12 female voices. weaving these elements together within the pavilion itself, Norment creates an immersive, multi-sensory space, which reflects upon the history of sound, contemporary concepts of consonance and dissonance, and the water, glass and light of Venice.
‘rapture’ reflects on how the body can be defined and potentiated by sound, with the pavilion speaking of the tensions between harmony and dissonance. if, as the Norwegian experimental composer Arne Nordheim said, ‘music lives in the span between poetry and catastrophe’, the visitor to the Nordic pavilion walks into a sculptural and sonic installation torn between these two ideas, a space between a body in trauma and a body in rapture.
"Rapture" by Camille Norment (Norway) in the Nordic Pavilion
Camille Norment’s Rapture, a strange, tense installation that takes the piercing, resonant tones of the glass harmonica as a starting point to explore the duality of violence and peace, action and repose at the Nordic Pavilion. Featuring the otherworldly space of the pavilion prominently, the architecture is adorned with speakers playing a churning, high-pitched composition, in contrast with broken glass and debris littered across the rooms of the show.
the Oslo-based artist works with the glass armonica – an 18th-century instrument invented by Benjamin franklin that creates ethereal music from the touch of fingers on glass and water – and a chorus of 12 female voices. weaving these elements together within the pavilion itself, Norment creates an immersive, multi-sensory space, which reflects upon the history of sound, contemporary concepts of consonance and dissonance, and the water, glass and light of Venice.
‘rapture’ reflects on how the body can be defined and potentiated by sound, with the pavilion speaking of the tensions between harmony and dissonance. if, as the Norwegian experimental composer Arne Nordheim said, ‘music lives in the span between poetry and catastrophe’, the visitor to the Nordic pavilion walks into a sculptural and sonic installation torn between these two ideas, a space between a body in trauma and a body in rapture.