Torn Tracks is an archive comprising an expanding collection of tracks. The project explores the potential of soundscapes recorded from Jiska Huizing’s surroundings, blending fragments to create connections between listening, place and sound. The exhibition serves as an early presentation of this evolving archive, inviting visitors to experience and contemplate the fluid categorisation and contextualisation of the tracks. Read about and listen to Torn Tracks here.
Torn Tracks is a project that is in constant flux. It is a collection consisting of a growing amount of tracks. These tracks do not have one final, fixed form, like songs on a music album. They can exist in various forms at the same time, and the possibility of them being re-recorded, replaced with others or taken away over time is never excluded. All the tracks together make up a collection that keeps changing over time and one can never be sure that it will be exactly the same the next time one encounters it. Currently, ways of presenting this ever-changing archive are being investigated. The platform for presenting the archive is still in development, and this exhibition functions as an opportunity to present the project and its collection of tracks in its early stages.
The tracks are made from sounds recorded from Huizing’s immediate surroundings (both more and less subtle, foreground and background sounds), often combined with sounds of her voice and electric violin. They are constructed with a collection of fragments that are brought together and juxtaposed to create new connections. They balance between music and sound art, playing with elements of both. Each track has its own idea or interest being investigated, but together they can form something other as well. The idea is to structure the archive in such a way that people can enter and browse it in diverse ways. With the different ways of organising the archive, the tracks also end up being categorised in different ways, changing their context and thereby changing the ways they can be heard and perceived. That the archive is structured in several ways, existing next to each other, is very important, because it emphasises the relativity of every single one of them, and of the archive as a whole.
For example, you can search for them being organised in a way that is similar to a bird guide, purely chronological, or based on their pitch. And if one would create an ‘average’ track out of the several versions that exist of it, how would that relate to the core idea of a track?
Huizing will be present during the exhibition’s opening times, working on new tracks to add to the archive; thereby expanding it while it is on display. Visitors are given the opportunity to sit down and listen in to this process. Lydgalleriet will be a room in which you can wander around and that gives space for discussion, but does not demand it. During the opening of Torn Tracks, Huizing gave a short presentation and performed a Torn Track.