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Born in 1985 in Pembury (UK), Oliver Beer lives and works between London and Paris. Through performances, films and concerts, the British artist, a trained composer and musician, places the human voice in space and reconfigures architectures by calculating their resonance frequencies. Lighting for the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.
At the heart of his work, the interaction between architectural space and the human voice feeds an important body of acoustic performances, articulated around what he calls The Resonance Project. In this project, Oliver Beer experiments with the interaction of space and sound. By revealing the oscillations of harmony and its "choreography" with the living, he establishes a real conversation between bodies and architecture, and the potential of this relationship to modify perceptions.
His works are organised in a face to face relationship between two sets of resonance boxes that interact with each other: the bodies of the singers and the architecture, which, depending on the materials used, become musical instruments.
Oliver Beer's sound compositions are based on feedback effects, echoes, loops, which increase the sound, the voice, multiplying the sung text by itself: recitative, prayer(Worcester College, Oxford, 2007), tautological description of architectures and places by the voices, constitute the materials of the song.
Thus the piece Pay and Display, (2010-2011) places the architecture of a large concrete car park under the control of the voices of a choir of singers and children's voices who make it resonate from two statements describing the use value of the car park: "You must Pay and Display" , " Except on Sundays" .
The recitatives sung in canon at several points in the architecture calculate the natural sound frequencies of the place.
Abbazia di Farfa, Rome (2008) infinitely multiplies the sound loop process at work in Oliver Beer's vocal constructions. The words of the 'Our Father' prayer are sung through the space of a Romanesque abbey church, using resonance frequencies to make the building audible. Recorded and broadcast over loudspeakers, the chanting of the 'Our Father' is in turn re-recorded and replayed in a loop, then recorded again (a device reminiscent of Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room, editor's note). In this looped sound process, the architecture itself absorbs the resonant frequencies that amplify, eliminating the non-resonant frequencies.
In Deep and Meaningful (2009-2010), the artist places a choir of singers in a Victorian sewer system in Brighton, in order to recalculate its resonant frequency. The sung word 'Amen', which fills the entire space of the sewer pipe, transforms it into a gigantic bagpipe.
Thus the works that make up the generic project The Resonance Project (2007-2010) are all compositions to tune architectural spaces. The sound score, set in space by the singers' voices, is gradually covered by the music "produced" by the architecture itself.
In a more recent piece, Oliver Beer has chosen the human body itself as a vehicle for the emission and diffusion of sound and voice. In Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taugh Me, 2018) pairs of singers perform traditional Australian Aboriginal songs, Indian ragas, mouth to mouth, respectively adjusting voice and breath to each other's bodies. In the exhibition Household Gods organised at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in 2019, he presented a large group of domestic objects from family collections to which the artist gave "voice", surrounding them with microphones amplifying the various sound frequencies relative to the exhibition space and whose rhapsodic resonance of the objects determined strange retroactive sound loops.
Finally, at the 59th Venice Biennale last June, the artist continued with Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained -a 24-hour performance in the Conservatory of Music-, the artist continued his experiments with the sound of objects: installed in front of a small harmonium, he played multiple scales, making various objects resonate in front of him, a teapot, a porcelain duck...
Pascale Cassagnau
