July 28, 2024 Sun & Sea Listening House, 2022

Mixed media installation
2022

© Castello di Rivoli

Sun and Sea Listening House derived from the opera-performance Sun and Sea. It is a portable audio version of the performance that allows one to experience it in nearly solitary mode.

The Listening House features a replica of a solitary beach cabin, which is meant to be placed outdoor, and houses the captured bits of the opera-performance Sun and Sea originally performed at the 58th Venice Biennale. The booth suggests not only the isolated attendance of a listener, but also the private engagement in nostalgia and the karaoke of a memory. A single vinyl spinning the wheel of recorded voices in a wooden room invites one’s being to embrace pandemic and post pandemic existences.

In the context of societal collapse and endtimes caused by human-induced climate crises and world pollution such as our own, the playful yet dramatic performative opera Sun & Sea (2019) became a milestone reflection on the anthropocene. This pocket installation version inside a beach cabin offers a physical installation version of the work for solitary listeners who can retreat from the outdoor world onto an indoor beach where they are protagonists and no longer audience in a memory theatre which is an elegy to a lost world of ecological balance.
— Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev


The work was selected by the Commissioning Committee 2021/23 and acquired through the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund. It will subsequently be donated to the Dutch state, becoming an integral part of the national art collection (‘Rijkscollectie’), available for institutions in the Netherlands and abroad. As of June 2024, the artwork is on a two-year loan to Museum Beelden aan Zee (NL).

Mixed media installation
Wooden cabin (2.5 m x 2.5 m x 2.5 m), found objects, sound (67’ loop)
Dimensions variable
Edition of 3 + 3 AP