As a city seeks to direct and contain movement on many specific levels, of flow, of movement, of behaviour, so it itself is shaped and contained by forces that we cannot readily see: of politics, of ideology, of aspiration. Therefore a city remains as much a product of the unseen, a visible projection in time and space of something that remains beyond, as something actual, concrete, here. The forces conjured by Naldi/Kirkup in CROSS-WINDS, are Aeolian ones – the winds, linked irrevocably with music though a mode of Greek church music taking the name and the eponymous Harp. The city is located, shifted so as to block and deny the access and effect of winds. The need to exclude has shaped the city plan. Aeolus here can represent an entire pantheon: some named, some still nameless, some approved and some abjured, the acceptance or exclusion of their intentions and arguments, shape and form the city. The music that radiates through the airwaves here is from narratives of femininity, voices and presences historically not given space in the authorised discourses of the city.
Richard Grayson, Director, EAF
Cross-Winds (1996) was based on research into the Adelaide city plan which itself is derived from Cataneo’s Renaissance interpretive design of the Vitruvian city plan.
The colonial model of the city’s grid is orientated according to the ‘wind rose’ which underlies it, a diagram which reflects the direction winds blow from the cardinal points of the compass, and used in city planning to inform street orientation to avoid the direction of the strongest, most disruptive winds. The Vitruvian city plan, founded on an eight part wind rose, also reflects its basis in the proportional symmetry of the classical male ideal body.
Within the Experimental Art Foundation 16 radio receivers were placed on the walls around the gallery indicating the positions of the wind rose within the city plan, and in relation to the position of the gallery itself. The receivers were tuned to a dedicated FM station airwave which continually broadcast female voices singing a selection of operatic arias. Within the gallery 8 dedicated speakers played a soundtrack of two recorded female voices humming single notes derived from these arias which blended and merged with the radio broadcasts throughout the space.
Made in collaboration with Pat Naldi.
Cross-Winds was a sound installation and FM radio-broadcast commissioned by The Experimental Art Foundation for the Adelaide Festival 1996.
Wendy Kirkup 