Borrowed Rooms
Marina Abramović dies seven times in a Copenhagen water reservoir, a Berlin foundation shows in nightclubs on purpose, and the format for lighting a building you are not allowed to touch turns seventy-four.
Under Søndermarken park in Copenhagen there is a reservoir, cut into Frederiksberg Hill in 1856 after cholera had killed several thousand people, that stopped supplying the city's drinking water in 1933 and was not finally drained until 1981. It is dark, it is dripping, the brick is furred with mineral growth, and the columns holding up the ceiling stand exactly where you would want to put an audience. Marina Abramović dies in it seven times, over about an hour, until 30 November. Nobody would build this room. Everybody should want it.
Borrowed Rooms
Attraction
The room sells the ticket. A drained reservoir, a nightclub, a château facade: the audience arrives already believing something is about to happen.
Production
Every borrowed room brings its problems, the drip, the echo, the column, the facade that will not take a fixing. Budget spent flattening them is budget not spent on the show.
The brief
Ask what this room does that an empty one cannot, then design for it.
Seven deaths in a Copenhagen water reservoir
Seven Deaths puts Abramović inside seven roles Maria Callas made famous — Violetta, who dies of tuberculosis; Tosca, who jumps; Desdemona, killed by Otello; Carmen, by Don José — as a series of short films opposite Willem Dafoe, set to recordings of Callas singing. It runs about an hour, and it is installed as separate screen setups scattered through the Cisternerne's chambers, so the audience walks from death to death rather than sitting through them.
The room is a former water reservoir beneath Søndermarken park, and it behaves like one. Water drips from the vault. Puddles on the floor catch whatever light escapes a screen. Sound carries so far through the brick that, as designboom describes arriving, the opera reaches you before you can locate which screen it is coming from.
via designboom ↗
Everything that makes this hard is doing the work. A single screen in a dry room gives you one vantage and one ending; a dozen obstructions give you an hour of searching for the source of a voice, which is a far better description of grief than any edit would manage. Note also what the format buys: distributing the piece across small setups means no single sightline has to be solved, so the columns stop being obstacles and start being walls. If you have ever lost a week to masking a room's awkwardness, this is the argument for spending that week somewhere else. It closes on 30 November, Abramović's eightieth birthday.
Grimanesa Amorós was handed the house lights
RADIANCE hung sixty feet wide above the Los Angeles Philharmonic for three performances in January, commissioned to accompany the piece we wrote about last week: Scriabin's Prometheus, the one with a light part nobody could play. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted. The sculpture is 60 × 35 × 5 feet of reflective material and colour-shifting rope LED on custom hardware, and Amorós — Peruvian-born, working in light since 2002 — built it around fire, naming both Prometheus and Viracocha, the Incan creator.
The detail that matters is not the sculpture. It is that Amorós programmed the sculpture and Walt Disney Concert Hall's own house lighting as a single environment, in a sequence written second by second against the score, resolving into six synchronised moments.
Ask a venue to hand over its house lighting and you will normally be told no, politely, for about six good reasons. That she got it is the whole story. A light sculpture fighting a hall's own lighting is decoration; a light sculpture that is the hall's lighting is staging, and the difference is a permission, not a product. Scriabin left the realisation open in 1911 and every revival has had to decide for itself — this one decided the answer was the room.
via designboom ↗
World of WearableArt: the room you cannot borrow
Joe Blanck (Australia), “Lophii.” Courtesy the artists and World of WearableArt 
Courtesy the artists and World of WearableArt 
Courtesy the artists and World of WearableArt
This year's World of WearableArt, running under the title GLO!, finished its season at TSB Arena in Wellington on 4 October. Kayla Christensen took the top award for Sacred Nightfall, a draped floral garment that nods to Indigenous ceremonial cloaks. The competition has been running since 1987 and takes entries from anywhere.
Look at Joe Blanck's Lophii and you can read the engineering off the photograph: an anglerfish skeleton big enough to swallow the performer, a lit lure cantilevered a metre past her head, and a wheel at the tip of the tail — because a structure that long cannot be carried, only balanced and rolled.
The counterweight to everything above. When there is no room to borrow, the work has to carry its own architecture, and every gram of it lands on one person who still has to walk. That tail wheel is the most honest fixture in this issue: a visible admission that the design exceeded what a body can hold, solved in the open rather than hidden. We have put wheels under scenery for exactly the same reason and been less upfront about it.
via Colossal ↗
Bettina Kames on showing art in nightclubs
Bettina Kames co-founded LAS Art Foundation in Berlin in 2016 with Jan Fischer, starting from a question she puts plainly: "why another art foundation?" Her answer — "It really needs to be an art foundation about the future" — has meant filling Halle am Berghain and Kraftwerk with work by Ian Cheng, Laure Prouvost and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, then taking exhibitions to Venice with Josèfa Ntjam and Natasha Tontey. The foundation is nomadic by design and keeps an online residency running alongside the physical shows.
The venue choice is the curatorial statement, and it is a sharper one than it looks. A white cube asks an audience to concentrate; a club has already taught the same audience to stand in the dark for hours, accept volume, and let an image wash over them without needing a label. That is a trained crowd, and it is free. The risk is the inverse — a room that reads as a club will flatter weak work until the lights come up — but a foundation whose stated subject is the future choosing buildings with no art-historical manners is at least consistent.
via designboom ↗
The format for lighting what you must not touch turns seventy-four
Château de Chambord son et lumière. Photo: Christophe.Finot (CC BY-SA 2.5) 
Son et lumière at Giza. Photo: MusikAnimal (CC BY-SA 3.0) 
Son et lumière at Giza. Photo: MusikAnimal (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The son et lumière was invented in 1952 at the Château de Chambord by Paul Robert-Houdin — not a showman but the château's curator. The form is exactly what it sounds like: light thrown onto a facade or a ruin, synchronised to narration and music, telling the history of the place while standing in it. Giza followed in the early 1960s. France alone now stages around fifty productions a year.
The detail that matters is whose idea it was. The person who invented projecting onto a monument was the person responsible for the monument's survival — which is why the form has the constraints it does. Nothing is fixed to the building. The show exists only after dark and leaves no trace by morning. Every heritage projection brief we have ever been handed restates those rules as though they were new, and they are seventy-four years old. If you want to know why a technique has the shape it has, find out who had to live with the consequences.
via Son et lumière ↗
BLINK Cincinnati
Four nights, 8 to 11 October, free, across thirty-odd blocks of downtown Cincinnati and over the Ohio River into Covington and Newport. More than eighty projection mappings thrown at the architecture, and on its own billing the largest public light and art event in the United States — a whole city borrowed at once.
via BLINK ↗
Festival of Lights Berlin
Ten nights on Berlin's landmarks, the Brandenburg Gate included. The son et lumière above, grown to the size of a capital and handed to a different artist every facade.
Anish Kapoor at the Hayward
London, closing 18 October. Worth it for the pigment work alone — surfaces that refuse to tell you how far away they are.
The rest of the month is on the Calendar.
Curated by Neves Creative. Every item links to its original source.