Assembled Patterns
Yellow Brick
15.07.2023
7 Eptapirgiou Str. Nea Ionia
Athens, Greece

^{Newspaper edition: Assembled Patterns

30 copies - digital print}

^{Listening Sessions: Cephissus & Saint-Panteleimon

Cephissus ‘21:33’ - Saint-Panteleimon ‘14:58’

Sound specific installation}

^{All photos by Alexandra Masmanidi}

Collaboration with Evelyn Vanoverbeke
On the occuassion of residency at Yellow Brick
18.06.2023 - 15.07.2023

Exhibition text

Aaron Daem and Evelyn Vanoverbeke are an artistic duo based in Brussels, sharing their fascination for urban environments and alternative forms of note-taking e.g. field recording, cognitive mapping and associative writing. During this presentation we immerse ourselves in the space of Yellow Brick that for some hours is transformed into a safe public space inviting us to sessions of deep listening. “Assembled Patterns” is a work in process, rather than a finished piece, an assemblage of questions that the artists pose to themselves both regarding methodology of research but also of a collaborative experience of artistic production.

Emerging in a city like Athens and Nea Ionia, where even the boundaries between municipalities are literally invisible, is chaotic and it would be superficial to claim that there is one single sound that represents all these multiple layers engraved in the urban environment. However the methodology followed scratched these layers revealing facts and provoking reflections. During the one month long residency at Yellow Brick in Nea Ionia they worked in search of the “Athenian” sound, researchin the documentation of language, urban “noise” and its absence. From the sound inside the church of St. Panteleimon, the echoes of sound of the city mix with the voices of the people inside, with children’s voices from the playground, creating a noisy environment in a topos of prayer and pre-supposed silence, making us wonder about the essence of lack of sound and the distance or closeness to the reality that this can create.

At the same time, their persistence and committed research around certain axes like the green line of the overground train enriched this sound archive with an alternation of the parallel sounds, the one that one can see (the train) and hear and the invisible one, the water running through the river underneath it. It is in this constant shift of the visible and the invisible sound resource that the sound pieces invite us in. Sounds that one can find familiar or not, can imagine their origin and can possibly give personal visual identity. At the same time their co-working methodology, common pace and working pattern is also integral and primary in the space. The visual manifestation of this collaboration is the platform built by the two artists as a working table. This functions both as a collector of accumulated knowledge, recordings of voices and sounds, notes and images but also as the common ground of collaboration. It is this common ground that with two equal sides it can also easily recall the popular phrase “what do you bring on the table?” Bringing their personal practices with different departure points and past manifestations, they chose this platform as a space of mutual exchange and common growth, using sound as their common means as it is new but also superficially invisible.

Text by Niovi Zarampouka - Chatzimanou

Assembled Patterns · Saint-Panteleimon

Assembled Patterns · Cephissus