The project Unarchivings (Resiting Nono) by Ellen Røed and Bjørnar Habbestad operates as a form of comment or intervention on archiving musical material hidden away from an acoustic everyday life. The project has developed through a method where human memory is examined and activated as a carrier of the musical material, and where musical material is moved out of the archive and unfolded into a local reality. Through an iterative process of re-listening, re-membering and re-performing each performance is informed by the accumulating layers of spatial acoustics and transcient everyday sounds, stored with the memory of the last musical performance, each iteration gradually building up to transform the musical material by spatial layering.
A musical practice involves a form of bodily memory characterized by local, informal and intuitive knowledge rooted in movement, gesture, hearing, other forms of sensation and presence. Sound and video art are also considered in the project as distinctive art forms with their own ability to investigate reality through the fact that they are both media-based and performative (body, movement, temporality) and can form active relationships between the surroundings, the camera/microphone, the collected the data/image and the user of the devices.
In the project, artists Ellen J Røed (visual art) and Bjørnar Habbestad (flute, contemporary music, electronic art) explore specific places through the lens of music composed by Luigi Nono (1924 - 1990). Utilizing site-specific strategies and instruments such as flute, microphones, and camera, the duo transferred musical fragments from Nono's archive in Guidecca, Venice, to other sites in Venice as well as sites in Norway and Stockholm. The project unfolded over a series of fieldwork sessions.
On the 24th of November 2018, as part of the research project Image as Site, their exploration of the site Plankan in Stockholm, resulted in a public performance in the yard of Plankan.
Kvarteret Plankan, Stockholm, 2018.