Two large-scale installation project.

3rd July 2019 – 1st September 2019

OSTRALE Biennale, Dresda

Grades of Foreignness is the project Yuval Avital has presented at Biennale OSTRALE 2019 in Dresda, where he opened the ceremony with a site specific performance in collaboration with AuditivVokal Dresden and dancers. The projects is made of two different but interconnected part: Lands v.2 and Foreign Bodies (n.1 Valle di Blenio, n.2 Saxony), parts of the Avital’s  Three Grades of Foreignness multimedia triptych presented for the first time at the La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation in 2017 (Val di Blenio, Switzerland) related to the delicate relationship between man and nature in our contemporary.

Lands V.2

24 loudspeakers, 3 automatons, soil, dolls, objects.

Lands v.2 is the evolution of Avital’s sound installation Lands, first presented at La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation, Switzerland. The circled soil is contoured by a forest of loudspeakers playing a complex polyphony of natural sounds, machines and human voices, creating numerous musical episodes which become a fresco of sonic allegorical scenes around the listener.  Witnessing Lands one can feel immersed in nature with the chirping of birds, insects and winds filling the air. But soon the perception changes.
The bird songs are gradually replaced by uncanny imitations of mechanical reproductions of their sound; the word “land” starts echoing in many languages through computer voicing; wind becomes storm; and so it shifts backwards to nature and forward to the artificial, in a struggle to obtain a hint of lost beauty and pureness. The public, while walking, sitting, lying down in it creates individual paths of hearing and perception. Three animals automatons, moving and producing evocative human sounds,  underline as the artificial can be a strange hybrid beauty, letting a constructed nature become a sonic sculpture of its own.

FOREIGN BODIES (n.1 Valle di Blenio, Switzerland, n.2 Saxony)

Modern identity, like victims trapped in our web, carnivores of our self.

11 parallel projections, 22 loudspeakers, duration loop 1h32m

In Foreign Bodies,  to the 7 parallel projections of Foreign Bodies n.1, Valle di Blenio are added the new 4 of Foreign Bodies n.2, Saxony, series created specifically for OSTRALE. The medical term "foreign body" corresponds to the human body, which intrudes, violates and makes nature artificial, loses its unity with it, becoming its external element. The profound dissonance and the gap between being with nature and being hostile to nature creates an inevitable tension entangled in.