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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, composer by training and musician by profession, places the human voice in space and reconfigures architectures by calculating their resonant frequencies. Spotlight on the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.
At the heart of his work, the interaction between architectural space and the human voice feeds an important corpus 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 veritable conversation between bodies and architecture, and the potential of this relationship to modify perceptions.
His works are organized in a face-to-face relationship between two sets of interacting resonance boxes: the singers' bodies and the architecture, which, depending on the materials used, become musical instruments.
Oliver Beer's sound compositions rely on feedback effects, echoes and loops that augment the sound and the voice, multiplying the sung text by itself: recitative, prayer(Worcester College, Oxford, 2007), tautological descriptions of architecture and places by the voices, constitute the materials of the song.
The piece Pay and Display(2010-2011), for example, places the architecture of a large concrete parking lot under the control of a choir of singers and children's voices, who make it resonate from two statements describing the use value of the parking lot: "You must Pay and Display ", " Except on Sundays ".
Recitatives sung in canon at several points in the architecture calculate the natural sound frequencies of the site.
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 resonant frequencies to make the building audible. Recorded and broadcast over loudspeakers, the chanting of the "Our Father" is in turn re-recorded and looped, 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 calculate its resonant frequency once again. The sung word "Amen" invades the entire space of the sewer pipe, transforming it into a gigantic bagpipe.
The works that make up the generic project The Resonance Project (2007-2010) are all compositions for tuning architectural spaces. The sound score, set in space by the singers' voices, is gradually overlaid by the music "produced" by the architecture itself.
In a more recent piece, Oliver Beer has chosen the human body itself as a vector 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 and Indian ragas from mouth to mouth, respectively adjusting their voices and breath to each other's bodies. In the exhibition Household Gods at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac 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 staged in the Conservatoire de Musique, the artist continued his experiments with the sound of objects: seated in front of a small harmonium, he played multiple scales, making various objects resonate as he placed them in front of him: a teapot, a porcelain duck...
Pascale Cassagnau
