Rain

Rolf Julius created compositions and spaces combining visual and acoustic elements, sound and images. The affinity he felt for contemporary composers, whom he discovered in the 1970s at festivals and on the radio following his artistic education, led to the inclusion of music and sound in his works. In his performances, held in both urban and rural spaces as well as indoors, he associated acoustic space with various materials and nature. Of the equal weight given to images and sound in his subtle, poetic acoustic sculptures located on the threshold between the aural and the visual, Julius said: “I create a musical space with my images. With my music, I create a visual space. Images and music are equal. They meet in the mind of the viewer and the listener and, inside, something new comes of it.”

During his regular stays at his cottage in Finland, Julius produced a series of works with stones which he found in nature, or in abandoned quarries where rainwater accumulated. By observing these stones, strangely quiet, abandoned and unseen by anyone, the artist realised that he was actually transforming them into works of art through his ‘own’ perception. In order to make their silence audible, he proceeded to make temporary interventions and photographed them. By temporarily placing a small, unconnected speaker on a stone in a puddle, he created a work almost imitating a sound installation. With this new visual counterpart, the stone’s relationship with its surroundings changed and the whole environment acquired a new organisation: “With the small loudspeaker, the space gained a sign for hearing, not for sound, as one might think. Everything became quiet, very quiet, even visually speaking.”

The work titled "Rain", belonging to the "small music" series, in which Julius explores desolate sound environments, is an audiovisual installation comprising a video sequence of raindrops falling into a puddle. The work consists of a small speaker placed on a stone rising above the water and the sound of falling rain. The image of the speaker and the sound of raindrops falling into the puddle become more and more ambiguous and enigmatic as the work unfolds. While we are inclined to think that the sound we hear is coming only from the speaker, we come to doubt that it is in fact only that of the rain recorded by the camera. Through a continued engagement with the work, we discover how the interplay between the two is even more complex and entangled.