Roofing offers an enriching and complex interaction between ceilings, skylights, spider webs, mini territories, vertically hidden subcultures, non-human communities and semi public spaces.
Installation from found ceiling and roof materials, fluorescent mural,
video and 3-channel sound (recordings from roofing sessions on site in Linz)
BB15 – LINZ, AUSTRIA, 2023
If basements could hear, they could hardly ignore roof gossiping.
Therefore since ancient times bricks have stuck together to build privacy.
Like monumental accordions, buildings expand and contract at different rates becoming fabulous companions of our materialistic lifes; Heat expands and cool reduces, materials may move slightly, sonorizing while rubbing against each other as lovers do.
Eventually, they’d contract and turn into some catchy pop
“too to too to too to to too.”
As they say, if walls could talk…
but our architectural past leaves no space for animism.
Moreover, buildings have no ears, everybody knows this.
they seem condemned to privacy.
Birds lending, woods scratching, door slamming plus the phantomatic presence carefully breaking the silence to remind us about building sonar exceptions and its usual silent state.
However, what aren’t the ceilings telling us?
no no no.
After all, if they weren’t so secretive there would be no point in studying their hidden rhythms.
shhhhhh.
Yes. It is tempting to stereotype Linz’s spicy secrecy, spying to the sound of ceilings by trying to transcend them.
_ – _ -x III “ _j
From Steel to Marble or bricks, there must be a difference.
Where and what can store and preserve sounds better?
Are secrecies deluded and hidden by grubby surfaces?
Are they diluted into a smooth surface?
Do murders need bricks? Does plaster remember screams? Will wood forget orgasm?
To the human eye and ear buildings have no memory nor agency.
You might not understand what is hidden on top of you,
always focussing to your horizontal surroundings.
You need to learn how to read, listen to, play and watch the ceilings, the skies.
Look up, listen up.
So, talk!
We, the ceilings, are celestial beings. The sounds accumulate in architecture,
by virtue of the spiritual potencies of our materials, they are equated with voices.
Voices from the past that we talk to, from the basements and the ground they permeate us.
We resonate.
Learn how to read, listen to, play and watch
the ceilings, the skies, the clouds, the materials above you, the pipes and wires, the lights.
Look up, listen up.
*Celestial, like ceilings. both derived from Latin celare “to hide, to cover, to conceal, save” and latin caelum Heaven and sky.
funduk* 