Subwoofers and visuals

“Three Grades of Foreignness” monographic exhibition, La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Art Foundation, Switzerland April 22 – September 23, 2017

Reh’em (=womb in Hebrew) brings Man and Nature together in an icon-sonic work that emblematizes many of Avital’s main themes of creation: archetypes, autobiographical elements, experiential immersiveness, technology, science. 

Walking into a narrow service elevator the visitor finds himself immediately enveloped by a maternal darkness. By stepping inside it one reconnects with a primordial intimacy where Man was in absolute oneness with Nature. The artificial here becomes the medium through which such equation is made possible: loudspeakers play pre-natal and natal sounds of Avital’s one-year-old daughter, Alma, recorded during her childbirth, alternating them with seismographic movements of the Earth. It is therefore the heartbeats - of Alma, of Nature, of visitors themselves - that are the metronome of this artificial womb, a microcosm where foreignness becomes intimate, private, known.

Transparent images are also projected, lightly piercing the darkness and floating around the elevator. Reh’em deploys darkness and sounds to guide visitors towards a collective and uncontaminated unconscious, letting them experience and re-live the identity between human and environment. Motherhood is the chosen link between past and future, oneness and multiplicity, private closed-endedness and open-endedness.