ALBUM 1981, installation by Gilles Aubry & Yves Mettler
for the Bex & Arts outdoor exhibition 2014, Bex, Switzerland, June 1st – October 5th 2014.
(6 louspeakers on “giraphon” stands, skype interviews with 14 artists from 1981, Yamaha DX7 demo sounds. A side: 20m + 10m silence; B side: 90m)
Aubry & Mettler focus on the first edition of Bex & Arts, in 1981. They started off with a photo album, which is the only one remaining archive, and went on to interview several of the invited artists on the basis of a questionnaire to do with the exhibition and the context at the time, as well as the interviewees’ opinion of photography as a support for recollections.
The idea is not that of narrating the past but rather to speak of the present through the past, taking into consideration the many filters between realities and temporalities: photographs, digitizing, recording, distribution. These contribute to preserving memories, but also to gradually blurring them. The interviews, interspersed with demo-sounds of a 1981-model synthesizer (Yamaha DX7), bring out how memory positions itself with respect to these sorts of supports, which are transformed and then end up as obsolete.
Audio excerpt of the piece
