Christoph Fink artwork

Song for a Lift, Brucity / Northwest area, 2023
A variation on sympathetic resonance
Artist: Christoph Fink
1963, Ghent, Belgium. Lives and works in Belgium.

Layers of sound (auditory landscapes from various parts of the world and instrumental compositions for electric guitar and percussion) are spread out, shifted in space-time by random systems, with evolving cosmic rhythms (sun/moon) and signaling functions (civil and religious timetables): it is an idea of the world as an orchestra and of the global event as a song. The lift becomes an instrument, a complex sounding board where its own sounds, its ascending and descending rhythms, resonate with added sound material.

Song for a Lift is a subtle balancing act between volume, timbre (the complexity of musical color) and the diversity of sound archives. Unspectacular, it is a hum that resonates on the edge of silence.

Design, orchestration and editing: Christoph Fink, sound archives: Christoph Fink & Joëlle Tuerlinckx, installation: Johan Vandermaelen, programming: Christoph De Boeck, maneuvers: Victor Pilar.

Ghent, 1963. He lives and works in Brussels.

Multidisciplinary artist and musician-composer with a public oeuvre since 1987 (group and solo exhibitions at international institutions such as the Tate, Kunstverein Salzburg, SMAK, Muhka, The Drawing Center and Dia Beacon, New York or at the biennales of Saõ Paulo, Istanbul, Venice and Manifesta in Frankfurt).

His work, under the generic title 'Atlas of Movements', focuses on the relationship between the intensity of individual experience and the global historical, geopolitical context. Musicality, as a philosophical and practical tool, plays a major role. Besides visual work, this results in polyphonic sound works, compositions, readings and performances (percussion, electric guitar and violin, electronics, live soundscape montage).

Since 1997 (and since 2015 in collaboration with Valentijn Goethals), he has worked closely with Joëlle Tuerlinckx on the sound and choreography of some of her exhibitions and especially on the whole of her film, performance and theatre work.

Short introduction to the Atlas of Movements

"What we know is that we perceive something, but not more than that" Heinz Von Foester

After the adventure of conceptual art, of abstraction in Europe, of minimalism in America, this is where I would situate my work: intensely connected to everyday life. It is from this starting point that it defines itself, that it takes and translates a certain pleasure in positioning oneself in the world, in perceiving and exploring the relationships between things: contemplating, living the landscape in the broadest sense of the term.

Initially, the idea behind an 'Atlas of Movements' was to archive travel material: audiovisual recordings, 'chronogeographical' notes (extremely brief yet detailed recordings) of passages through these 'surprisingly dynamic still lifes'. The processing of these data, mainly lists of annotations and space-time indications, resulted in complex experimental forms of presentation, expansive cartographic and sound constructions (drawings, diagrams, tables, mobiles, soundscapes and instrumental compositions). In other words: possible translations of these observations.

Through processing, subjective methods and systems, these direct experiences of landscape end up incorporating a wider set of data, of current events, philosophical, geographical and sociological studies, confrontations and collaborations, other forms of poetic expression. Individual experience is therefore 'informed' by the collective context of the environment. And vice versa. The work, beyond journeying through the landscape and taking notes in the field of observation, forms a much broader set of studies, grouped together under the generic title of "Atlas of Movements".

From a musical point of view, the poetic significance of the work can be understood even more acutely. (The term "movements" was deliberately chosen because of its musical connotation). Beyond the graphic form of the visual artwork, which resembles a musical score (codified retranscriptions of movements in time and space), the central idea is to envisage the world or "reality" as a musical structure in its broadest sense.

In doing so, we return to one of the first stages of this enterprise of notifications, observations, transformations, and to the poetic potential of the notation of time and space associated with it. The past and the future eternally unite in a hyper-dynamic present in perpetual motion.

This is the 'superfluous' and intangible part of 'reality'. This is, in my opinion, what we attempt to grasp and untangle in the arts. This is also where this work lies: a questioning and a wonderment before the mystery of this "reality", nothing more and nothing less.