In HoME – House.Music.Europe the team of four new music organisations and 12 artists from diverse musical and artistic background, selected through an open call, worked together in three consecutive project-phases.
After the online kick-off meeting in 2021 we started to work on the first project phase. The creation of the HoME-House, the most essential part of our project. It s a mobile installation capable of real-time sonification of individual story telling actions. A mobile studio with an excellent looking little space with a chair (or space for a wheel-chair) and a screen-panel, and some further equipments. All this together is capable to host one guest who answers our question “What means home to you?”. His/her answering action is translated to a data stream to the computer, that creates the sonification, a sort of musical flow, audible outside the HoME-House for other members of the community. It is important to say, that the words told inside the house, are not comprehensible in the sonification outside the House. The musical flow is produced with the help of different patches and algorithms created by the HoME artists. Participating audience gets an automatically generated and printed QR code and an url points to the recording of the sonification, that was created from their words.
We had a residency with the House at the Moholy-Nagy University (MOME). HoME House is built on a trailer, that we can tow anywhere with almost any car with a hook and a normal drivers licence. We decided to make a tour first in rural settlements where any of the participants has some roots, or personal connections. The aim was, to reach out to an audience outside of our urban, contemporary art related environment. We can say, that all these events were touching and we felt, that all people has a need to think and talk together about home, family and the oral history connected to these. This experience, and the collected recordings and their sonifications were the starting points of all further phases of the project.
The second phase was the creation of a collective Home-Exhibition. We met for five days at the Art Quartier Budapest (AQB) where we had accommodation and nice working spaces as well. Home-Exhibition had seven separate installations, among them were video installations, objects, audio installation that the visitors could listen with an eye-folder, or other complex audio-visual –partly interactive – works. A description of each of these can be found at our website. Our Exhibition had its premier in Barcelona at the Mixtur Festival in October 2022. In Novi Sad it was shown in the beginning of the next summer at the Svilara Cultural Center. At the other two locations, in Vienna and Budapest, we decided – partly because of the delay caused by the pandemics – to show the installations at the final presentation of the project, together with the result of the third project phase, an hour long performance-piece.
“A Moment to Land” became the title of the performance that was premiered in Novi Sad in September 2023, and during the next weeks in Vienna, Budapest and Barcelona as well. We were collaborating with instrumentalists of the Ansambl 2K+ in Novi Sad, the Black Page Orchestra in Vienna, the UMZE Chamber Orchestra in Budapest and the Barcelona Modern Ensemble at the Mixtur festival.
We closed our project with finalising the collected database of recordings and sonifications.
The biggest learning for each of the participants of HoME was that we were able to get closer, and share our artistic homes with each other, even when our backgrounds, traditions, the defaults of our disciplines, our creative preferences or working habits and norms are so different. All our project-output was a clear manifestation of this development.
More details:
https://housemusiceurope.eu/
https://www.instagram.com/housemusiceurope/