Venice Biennale 2007
 
                                       Biennalists : THE TALKING BAG
   
                                                                    SOUND INSTALLATION EXPRESSING  A DAILY AJUSTED COMMENT ABOUT


                        NATION /NATIONAL/ NATIONALISM      
                                               with support from the danish art council
                              
Concept and Manuscript: Copyright Colonel, Copenhagen April 2006

Based on the observation that  visteurs of the Venice biennaliste – all day long – mention names of countries. Without even noticing, this is an inclusive part of the dialogue of the people travelling to the biennial venue.

With his sound assistants,       Colonel will extract common sentences from  the people touring the giardini for the art and travelling on the vaporettoes, pausing on the bridges and queuing for access to the parties in the evening. The extracted sentences will strangely have the name of a nation as their main subject.

The common dialogue by the biennale people  repeatedly mention nations .When they meet one another and hereby they brand the countries and contribute to a competitive classification to a hierarchy of influence. Strangely, stories circulating in Venice around the biennial have countries as main character, like the names of countries were heroes per se. Nations become the centre of truth but also enter the zone of fiction and hype. Instead of referring to titles of art works and names of artists, it seems natural to simply mention nations.

On a daily basis around the opening of the biennial, the sound extracteurs will collect sound recordings to build an immediate archive. These recordings of authentic sentences contain stories circulating on and about the biennale.. The extracteurs will record, collect and archive these comments for sampling use.

Doing so, the extracteurs take the temperature of the biennale and catch stories from the art pilgrims  themselves as they start to circulate and create patterns of meaning around the general opinion. This approach is comparable to a sociological method of collecting live research material, similar to field studies for scientific results.

Every evening Colonel will compose a fiction with the help  of  the artist sound mixer  Copyflex and the writer Morten Friis . The composed fiction is a sampled reorganisation of the collected material, which is the real information and facts from people’s dialogue and stories about countries.  The team will compose a fiction like a novella – which includes the ingredients of reality in a rewritten scenario. The best material will be used for a final composition summarizing the Venice Biennial 2007 – it will be the jingle for all.

Everyday, the result of the remix will be redistributed in the city by distributeurs wearing rucksacks playing the sound novella of the day.

The distributeurs will transport the stories to crowded places, mixing with people gathering around. In Venice, conversation is never really private. When riding a vaporetto or pausing on a bridge, we hear bits and pieces of other people’s conversation which makes it difficult to decide who is actually saying what. Like in a movie of Fellini, you hear a constant background sound of conversation in Venice. There is another reason why this project is perfect for Venice: because it is a silent city without cars. The only natural sound is the gentle splashes of water in the canals. It will be easy for the sound redistributeurs to blend in the in the city:

                    

                
 
Day by day, the awareness of the sound mix grows and becomes a music hit that will reach people on a sub conscious level, like the strong elements of popular culture. . The novella – the jingle – will be like a summer love melody, the melody of the Venice Biennial 2007, an unforgettable melody of the branding nations.




Motivations:

This project will make the biennial itself a subject and create a biennial fiction story based on real material. This will happen through the actions of observe and create, in relation to the Colonel Moving Exhibition manifest from 1989. This project also works on the concept of ultra fast reality  mixed with fiction. As a result, this project will develop the concept of the novella (music jingle) in public space. Finally, it will address the notion of fluidity and distribution .


The bags will a collaboration beetween Colonel and Henrik Vibskov whom was also part of the New York Emergency Room at PS1
The d - day will be the 06 of june  2007 everywhere