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In-Situ/City: Gemma Luz Bosch

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The sound of clay and water - Vital materials in the work of Gemma Luz Bosch

In-Situ/City is an ongoing project that focuses on the city as an ever-changing changing collection of historical, cultural, political and social signifiers. For Gaudeamus 2022, four young makers (groups) were commissioned to create new work that reflects on this theme, with a special focus on the relationship between humans and non-humans. In four articles, music journalist and researcher Joep Christenhusz dives deep into their work and themes.

Would I like to have a go at it too? In the studio of sound artist Gemma Luz Bosch (1999) stands a large bucket of water in which a home-made ‘water flute’ has just been submerged, puffing and howling softly. Carefully, for fear of breaking something, I take the instrument from her. For its size (the size of a beach ball), the ceramic object feels remarkably light and manageable. And yet, when I lower the fired clay into the water, it turns out that it takes some practice to produce anything resembling an even tone from it. Too slow, and the sound falls away for lack of air pressure. Too fast, and a shrill flute concerto of overtones can be heard.

Bosch developed the water flutes during an internship at ecological cultural centre Metaal Kathedraal (Utrecht), and christened them ocarunos. This exotic name refers to the ocarina, the hand flute that played an important role in Mayan and Aztec culture from time immemorial. Bosch started out from a similar acoustic principle: a hollow ceramic space in which a column of air is caused to vibrate. However, where the traditional ocarina is blown through a mouthpiece, Bosch has provided her ocaruno with an open base. The rest is physics: when the ocaruno descends, the water pushes the internal air upwards, where the air molecules are pressed over a labium. We perceive the resulting vibrations as pitch.

For Gaudeamus’ In-Situ/City project, Bosch is taking her ocaruno concept a step further. At the time of writing she is working on a ‘sluice flute’ that will sound for the first time in September during an open-air performance based around the Utrecht Weerdsluis (a well-known complex of locks north of the city centre). In principle the new instrument will work in a similar way to her ocarunos, Bosch explains, but with one important difference: “Up to now it was people who played my instruments, but if all goes well the sluice flute will soon be played by the water itself.”

When I speak to Bosch she is in the middle of the experimentation phase and is trying to get her head around some practical snags. “One tricky obstacle is the slow speed at which the water rises,” she explains. “At the Weerdsluis lock it takes about twelve minutes before the water level reaches its highest point. In order to obtain a workable air pressure, this length of time must be in proportion to the surface area of the instrument.” Thorough calculations have now shown that the sluice flute will have colossal dimensions: a tidy two metres by eighty centimetres. Chuckling: “It’s going to be a tough job, but I think it’s going to work.”

Whispering concert of hissing and slurping sounds

An oversized ceramic construction from which emerges a whole range of flute sounds; it will undoubtedly provide a tremendous spectacle in early September. And yet, in addition to an imposing increase in scale, Bosch’s sluice flute also embodies a fascinating turnaround in musical relations, if only because the instrument provides a natural element as a performer. Not man, but water (H2O) becomes the musician here.

English philosopher Timothy Morton sheds a clarifying light on the ecological twist that is taking place here. In his book Ecology without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), he analyses the capacity of art to make us aware of the world around us. One of the strategies he distinguishes in his poetics of ambience is the emphasis on the medium in which the artist in question is working: the graphic symbols with which the writer writes, the paint with which the painter paints, the instruments for which the composer composes.

Characteristic of medial works of art, Morton writes, is that they do not primarily communicate a narrative or content, but that they draw attention to the perception itself. The content is the sensory perception of the medium in question in all its materiality. An example: relax your gaze and just shift your focus from these letters to the screen on which you are reading them. Do you see the matte gloss of the surface, the aluminium or plastic framework? Or when you hold the printed version of this text in your hands, do you see the white margin that marks the edge of this page, or the tiny fibres in the paper?

Yes? Good. Then the follow-up question: were you aware of the shift that just took place here? In the space of a few sentences, background became foreground. What just happened to be on the fringes of consciousness, as a more or less accidental vehicle for a text, now appears in its full materiality in the centre of attention. Something similar takes place in Bosch’s work, which is also distinctly medial in nature. By testing clay and water for their acoustic richness, the perspective shifts here as well: materials that usually serve as barely noticeable decor for our human concerns suddenly take on a performing role themselves.

Also illustrative in this context is her concept Clay Breath, which according to Bosch herself is her “purest” clay instrument. During my studio visit I get a taste of it when she suddenly plucks a parcel wrapped in cloth from a storage shelf. When she unfolds the cloth a number of thin tubes emerge, ending in a bowl-shaped cavity at their top. “This clay is not baked, but dried,” Bosch explains, guiding me back to the bucket. “When it comes into contact with water it immediately sucks itself full again.” And sure enough: when I lower one of the tubes into the bucket, the bowl-shaped cavity over my ear, I hear a whispered concert of soft hissing, slurping, and gurgling sounds. I can literally hear the clay breathing.

Sound artist couple Bosch & Simons (Bosch’s parents)

Sound nerd

Bosch’s work could be labelled a form of sonic materialism. Not only because materials so emphatically form the starting point for her sound world, but also because in her hands sound itself becomes a material that can be made and moulded. See also her graduation thesis, which can be read as a study of the basic principles of sound production. Bosch methodically maps out the various ways in which ‘kinetic energy’ (movement, in the vernacular) can be converted into the air vibrations that the human ear perceives as sound. In a theoretical chapter she distinguishes between sounds that are the product of, respectively, friction and collisions between objects. A separate section is devoted to so-called ‘standing sound waves’ and vibrating air columns. In an empirical section she examines how the material and shape of a sound source affect the resulting sound. How do size and diameter translate into pitch? How many overtones can be heard, and in what proportion? Tables present the answers with scientific precision in centimetres, grams, Herz numbers and decibels.

What is also striking about Bosch’s approach to sound is a certain acoustic essentialism. To her, sounds are not so much a means (to self-expression, narrative ulterior motives, musical rhetoric or symbolic meanings), but often an aim in itself. In that respect, Bosch admits, she feels like a kindred spirit to John Cage, the American composer who erased his own artistic intentions in order to let sounds “be themselves” (Experimental Music, 1957). But her parents, the sound artist couple Bosch & Simons, were also an important source of inspiration for her current thinking about sound: “For as long as I can remember we philosophised about sound at home, asking questions such as: ‘Is there a difference between sound and noise?’ Or: ‘Does a sound have to be heard before it can be called a sound?’ Together we’re a terrific bunch of sound nerds.”

‘Vital materiality’

Bosch’s parental home was in Spain, the country to which her parents emigrated in the 1990s. She grew up near Valencia, an environment that still resonates in her fascination with the sound of water. Bosch: “Water was a big theme in my youth. Because Spain is so dry and, what’s more, getting ever drier, people learn from an early age to deal with water very responsibly. It was instilled into us that water is the source of all life: ‘Donde hay agua hay vida’ (‘Where there is water, there is life’). That awareness is still reflected in my work.

The intertwining of matter and life. It seems such an obvious fact. And yet, in the modern thinking of Western man we see again and again the reflex to divide the world into vital life force on the one hand (we, the living beings) and dead materials on the other (‘it’, the elements, the things). In her book Vibrant Matter, a Political Ecology of Things (2010), the American theorist Jane Bennett criticises precisely this dualistic convolution of the brain. Instead, she argues for what she calls a vital materiality, a concept with which she calls attention to the intrinsic capacity of materials to act, their potential to produce effects; in the world and in our bodies, for better or for worse. Only when we recognise this thing power, writes Bennett, are we able to enter into an intelligent and sustainable interaction with nature. And this is urgently needed, she argues, because “The image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris as well as our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”

It is tempting to think that Bosch’s instruments are trying to whisper a similar message to us. Put them to the test at Weerdsluis lock in September. Take a seat at the waterside and listen to dried clay squeaking, hissing and gurgling as it fills itself up with water. Instinctively you will immediately be struck by the strangeness of the scene, but also by its remarkableness. As if the sound makes you realise that this is not just dead matter, but an interaction between molecules (minerals, water, oxygen) that form the basis of life on earth – human and more-than-human.