Nickel van Duijvenboden – Echolocation (Session)

Premiere Dark Ecology Journey 12 June 2016 Sydvaranger Industriomåde, Kirkenes, Norway www.darkecology.net Echolocation (Session) is a work by Nickel van Duijvenboden, commissioned by Dark Ecology 2016. Echolocation (Session) is a commissioned work by Nickel van Duijvenboden. Following his micro residency in Kirkenes, Nickel van Duijvenboden gave a performative reading inside a disused communal space belonging to the Kirkenes mine. Van Duijvenboden blended speech with sound recordings and live instruments in a loosely arranged setting, creating a parallel narrative based on a prior visualization of the location and a psycho-geographical exploration of the surroundings. In Van Duijvenboden’s recent work, written exchanges serve as a technique not just to create an intimate discourse, but also, paradoxically perhaps, distance, or a sense of withdrawal. To Van Duijvenboden the written letter has become a means of rhythmic reporting from a situation of constructed ‘remoteness’. It allows a degree of improvisation, which in some cases recalls the act of dérive: an unplanned journey undertaken by a flaneur. Nickel van Duijvenboden’s (NL) work centres on the question of how to visually represent a writing practice. The word ‘writing’ here should be understood in its broadest sense, including reading, speech, script, correspondence, translation, reproduction, archiving, broadcasting... Each of these notions, in terms of its representation, is characterised by a lack – a lack that becomes readable in the work and lends it an ongoing and performative dimension. www.nickelvd.nl