Waiting Room
Immersive sound installation and video archive
Sound design by Jaakko Autio
Curated by Alice Smits
Zone2Source gallery, het Glazen Huis, Amstelpark, Amsterdam
The glass pavilion in Amstelpark is located in a human-made park, a representation of nature that proposes a peaceful and natural relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. Thus, one function of the park is to make invisible other, less peaceful forms of human-nonhuman interaction. The installation Waiting Room plays with the double exposure of the park and the slaughterhouse, and the simultaneous invisibility and presence of the factory farm complex in the modern world. From a distance, the pavilion seems completely empty – only the sign Waiting Room signals for viewers to come in. Inside the pavilion the viewer enters a space that is visually dominated by the landscape of the park, while an immersive soundscape creates an acoustic environment of the waiting area where pigs are enclosed before being brought to slaughter. The recorded soundscape is played back from 16 speakers in 1:1 scale so that it represents the authentic acoustic experience of the original space. The audio traces of lives that have already passed through their inevitable death create a space of haunting that points to the mortality of all beings.
The sound installation is accompanied by a video that presents quotes and dictionary entries on the meanings connected to the words “terror” and “terrorism”.
