Thresholds: an ISM Hexadome installation

Thresholds is a multichannel sound and video installation piece commissioned in 2018 by the Institute for Sound and Music Berlin for the ISM Hexadome and was exhibited at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin.

Thresholds creates a transsensorial space for storytelling on topics of territory, recognition and memory. Together musician Lara Sarkissian and artist Jemma Woolmore craft an immersive experience from aural and physical architectures; playing with disorientation, stability, unrest, familiarity and recollection.The piece is an ambient electronic landscape referencing Armenian music, field recordings and churches (both in its sonic and physical form); as the architecture of churches have often been designed with the intentions of acoustic ecology and spatial experiences in mind. The score collages elements of voices, hymns, instruments; holding space for modern day Armenian narratives tied to uprooted ancestral pasts [and present].

The hexadome screens become a landscape to be navigated and divided, creating symbolic borders that are enforced, blurred or dissolved throughout the work. Patterns emerge that appear to both isolate and encompass, generating complex and unfamiliar territories, exploring the fragile boundary between Utopia and Dystopia.

Composition by Lara Sarkissian

Video by Jemma Woolmore

Media: 6 channel video and 50 channel sound installation

Duration: 18min

Commissioned by the Institute for Sound and Music Berlin for the ISM Hexadome