Journées Musicales de Carthage · 2021 · Live A/V

Ambivalence · JMC Autrement

NASA star data mapped onto the vaults and chandeliers of Bir Lahjar and made interactive, driven live by DAWAN’s sound, for a night walk through the Medina of Tunis.

JMC Autrement came out of a residency programme for the electronic and visual art scene, directed by Aymen Gharbi and Zied Meddeb Hamrouni, pairing each sound artist with a visual artist. Ambivalence took NASA star data as its material. The dataset was mapped onto the vaults, columns and chandeliers of the Centre Culturel Bir Lahjar, and made interactive, driven live by DAWAN's sound, so the sky overhead was not an image of a sky but a reading of one, reacting in the room. The programme ran in two stages. The first residency was at Dar Sébastien, the Centre Culturel International de Hammamet, where the piece was tested on the stone tiers of the open-air theatre that looks out to sea. The second residency went deeper and refined it. Each pair then chose its own venue in the Medina of Tunis, which meant re-adapting work conceived in the open air to a space with its own acoustics, its own surfaces and its own history. Bir Lahjar brought carved stone, arches and hanging lamps, none of it flat, all of it already ornamented. The stars had to find a different architecture to land on. The audience did not sit down. They walked the Medina at night, from Dribet Dar Hessine through Midhet el Soltan and Club Tahar Haddad to Bir Lahjar, moving between four performances. Journées Musicales de Carthage, 19 December 2021. Curated by Aymen Gharbi.