Waterbirds: Migratory Sound Flow

Interested in language, sound and the afterlife of obsolete technologies, Tania Candiani creates devices that translate images, shapes, and words into sounds and music by repurposing looms, keyboards, typewriters, and various old mechanical devices to create wind, chord, or percussion instruments. She sees these objects as interfaces between ‘the soul of the machine’ and other types of sensibilities, including those of humans and animals, and often references ancestral knowledges and stories.

Waterbirds: Migratory Sound Flow is a hanging 'river' made with tree branches collected from a riverbank in Mexico. Its organic shape is loosely based on an aerial view of the Murray-Darling basin in Australia. Says Candiani, 'This piece has as its starting point the migrations of aquatic birds. As a great blood system, the path of these birds connects hundreds of bodies of water in the Australian territory. [The] installation consists of a network of sound, light, wind and water. The system uses handmade reproductions of traditional pre-Hispanic aerophones (clay ocarinas, shells, wooden flutes) and field recordings of water birds in Australia, to create a continuous and changing chant in the space of the Cutaway.'