INSOMNIA
Musical – visual installation
Museum of Art Lucerne in collaboration with the Lucerne Festival 2011
Leaving the safety zone of sleep to penetrate the blind spot of the night: the artist approaches this theme with two experiments and produces an immersive, constantly changing transdisciplinary installation. The audience delves with the body and the senses into the most diverse accumulated states which the night represents.
Two experimental situations form the basis for this installation: Charlotte Hug subjects herself to 40 hours of sleep deprivation in the sleep laboratory of the University of Zurich. She draws, plays, and sings continuously for 40 hours. This art experiment is scientifically supervised by sleep researcher Prof. Dr Peter Achermann.
The experiment which Hug conducted on herself in the sleep laboratory is contrasted and amplified by another experience with another dimension of time. For five hours Charlotte Hug allowed herself to be immersed in the rising tide of the Atlantic in the dockyard near Cork in Southern Ireland, while playing the viola and singing. The tide rose as far as her neck. The playing became almost euphorically light and powerful at the same time. Her graphite drawings on semi-transparent lengths of paper were also released into the water. Using the ebb and flow of the tidal rhythm, Hug would draw during each ebb. With the flow, the graphite traces were slowly washed over and washed out by the water, and then drawn again with the ebb. In this way, a palimpsest-like ‘eternal drawing’ was created over the course of a month.
Michel Foucault speaks of ‘heterotopias’ - other places. Heterotopias also bring together spaces in the same place that are in fact incompatible. So, at the Lucerne Museum of Art, the installation ‘Insomnia’ from the sleep laboratory, and Hug’s experience in the tides of the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland are also united in a single hybrid and highly charged place.
VIDEOANIMATION FLOOD In the tides of the Atlantic
VIDEO INSOMNIA ART-TV Charlotte Hug as Artiste Etoile at the Lucerne Festival.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the installation is in a constant state of flux. Ever-new combinations of composed music modules, light rhythms and rotating, double-sided Son-Icons can be experienced. In the evening, the installation mutates into a spatial score for solo performances as well as ‘comprovisations’ for the London Stellari String Quartet, which are carried out in collaboration with the Lucerne Festival under the motto ‘Night’.
Curator: Peter Fischer, dramaturge: Mark Sattler, Lightning: Christa Wenger Blendwerk
Thanks to Pro Helvetia, the UBS Cultural Foundation, the Museum of Art Lucerne, and the Lucerne Festival.
