Amnios

Amnios

Installation (work in progress)

Amnios, a new audiovisual installation by visual artist Yannick Jacquet and sound artist Koenraad Ecker, explores the fluid spaces of submersion in the form of a visual polyptych within a spatialised sound environment.

Both in the mythological, religious and in biological sense, the state of submersion epitomizes the physical space where (re)birth and death intersect : the porous boundary between the aquatic calm of immersion and the violent vitality of coming up for air, between water as a protective shell and water as a physical threat, between the body heat of the womb and the steely cold of the ocean’s depths.

Whether as a biological environment preceding birth (where auditory impulses, filtered through water, blood and skin are the first form of contact with the outside world), the religious act of submerging a person in a stream or the socio-historical act of drowning when crossing the sea (cfr. the Middle Passage and its associated mythology, or the contemporary Mediterranean), the state of submersion is the environment in which a transformation takes place; an act of crossing-over from one physical form to another.

Visually and sonically, water serves as the primary material: footage captured by cameras floating at the sea’s surface, tossed about by the waves, is merged with deep monochromes, hydrophone (i.e. underwater microphone) recordings and spatialided sound design into a sensual work that vacillates between serenity and viscerality. Through the usage of color and sound design, the original material will be transformed from the merely documentary into a dynamic environment that evokes a living organism, a body of water and an imagined, sensate state of suspension. It is the artists’ aim to create, through the nexus of this state of submersion, a work that is rich in sensorial, biological, ecological, religious and mythological associations.

Visuals: Yannick Jacquet
Music, sound design: Koenraad Ecker