“SOUND PAVILION” (2009), BY DOUG AITKEN, IS ONE OF THE NEW PERMANENT INSTALLATIONS INAUGURATING IN INHOTIM

In “Sound Pavilion” (2009), Doug Aitken provides to the visitor the experience of listening, in real time, to the sound of Earth’s inside. The work consists of a sound installation located in a round, glass-enclosed pavilion devised by the artist. At the center of the pavilion, in a 200-meter deep hole, high sensitivity microphones have been set to capture different sound frequencies. The sounds of Earth’s inside are amplified into the building, bringing to surface traces of a nearly always unimaginable reality. Located at the top of a mountain, in an area of expansion in Inhotim, the work offers the view of a vast landscape of woods.

The creation of this glass pavilion deepens the artist’s interest in articulating the architectural space with the work’s other elements – notedly, in this particular case, sound. Access to the internal space of the pavilion is given by a spiral ramp, hence leading the visitor naturally into the core of the installation. Therein one is confronted by the 200-meter deep hole and attraction is drawn to the source of that sound gathering. “Sonic Pavilion” (2009) sets a new moment in the artist’s production, searching for a narrative with sounds alone and ascribing the work’s imagetic portion to nature and architecture.

Since the 1990s, Doug Aitken (Redondo Beach, USA, 1968; lives in Los Angeles, USA) has developed a series of films, photographs, installations, and videos that investigate the relations among nature, memory, time, and space. His oeuvre speaks of uninhabited places, ruins, remains of a place where time seems to possess a different pace. Although the artist has devoted most of his latest research to installations with video and to his films, his concern with the architectural space is always present in his works.

Doug Aitken has taken part of several solo and group exhibitions, as well as showing his work in cinema and video festivals. Among his latest relevant projects, Migration (2008), at the Carnegie International Show (Pittsburgh, USA), and Sleepwalkers (2007), exhibited on the façade of the Museum of Modern Art, in Nova York, are worth mentioning. In 2005, he exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and, in 1999, was awarded Venice Biennial’s Golden Lion for the installation “Electric Earth”.