COLUMNA(S): A CONVERSATION
Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz in conversation with Gascia Ouzounian
DAAD Gallery, Berlin
As part of the programme Concrete Dreams of Sound
Nicole L’Huillier in activation of Columna(s) by Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz at DAAD Gallery, Berlin, 24 April 2024. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
This conversation traces the conceptual, material, and collaborative evolution of Columna(s), an experimental sound-sculptural work by Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz.
Moderated by Gascia Ouzounian, the discussion begins with the project’s origins—emerging from a SONCITIES commission and a shared interest in architectural sound practices. The artists reflect on how their practices—Samuel’s focus on sonic interstices and Nicole’s theorisation of membranes—intertwined to produce a column not as a static support structure, but as a porous, vibrational, and communicative body.
The column is composed of modular blocks, each embedded with piezos and speakers, forming a system that both emits and receives sound. The artists discuss how the column listens to itself, amplifies its own internal resonances, and becomes an instrument of collective sonic expression.
Themes of colour, contamination, and anti-surveillance are central to the conversation. Nicole and Samuel reject the minimalist ‘black-box’ aesthetics of sound art, embracing vibrant colours as a refusal of modernist neutrality and as a statement of presence. Nicole positions her membrane microphones and listening devices as politically charged—highlighting rather than hiding the apparatus, inviting interference rather than clarity, and resisting extractive listening models in favour of collective noise and unintelligibility.
Later in the conversation, Nicole introduces the concept of the Surlogical—a sonic logics of the South inspired by Andean collective musical practices, particularly wind instruments and improvisation. She shares how instruments like the flauta colectiva become a tool for distributed listening and shared agency.
Audience questions bring further attention to embodiment, breath, and the affective dimensions of the installation. The discussion closes with reflections on the column as a living, evolving entity—a trembling, rubbery architecture that invites touch, instability, and co-resonance.
Samuel Perea-Díaz in activation of Columna(s), DAAD Gallery, Berlin, April 23, 2024. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
Columna(s) (2024) by Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz. Installation view at DAAD Gallery, Berlin as part of Concrete Dreams of Sound Open Lab. Curated by Dahlia Borsche and Gascia Ouzounian. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
Nicole L’Huillier in activation of Columna(s), DAAD Gallery, Berlin, April 23, 2024. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
1 - From Sonic Interstices to Vibrational Membranes
Gascia: Thank you so much, Samuel and Nicole. This was such a beautiful activation of Columna(s)—the very first activation of Columna(s). This incredible creature, which has been growing in Samuel’s atelier and Nicole’s atelier and other spaces over the last few months, has had its outing for the first time today and has come to life through your activation.
Maybe we start with the origins of this project and this collaboration. What were some of the initial discussions you were having around creating an architectural element like the column, but reconfiguring it in the way that you have? Where did it start? How did it start?
Samuel: This project was commissioned by SONCITIES—we were working together. Gascia was involved because it was more like an artistic research project. The first point was why Gascia chose us together. In my practice, I’m interested in sonic interstices. The interstitium is an anatomical term; it is an organ—one of the most complex organs in the body. It’s the in-between: between the skin and other tissues. It’s a membrane, a cell membrane. I try to find this kind of place in my architectural research—how I can dig through, with technologies, to zoom in to the level of vibrations.
I also create installations using architectural objects, and I re-scale sounds that I’m relocating—relocating sounds. I’m also questioning how much architecture has been archiving or sensing sounds, and how we can reach into them somehow.
In this project, there was Gascia’s idea of bringing together my research on sonic interstices with Nicole’s work on membranes. I’m interested in architectural elements; Nicole is interested in membranes. This is how we started with the column: looking at how to create an architectural element that can be like a pillar, but can also be a wall. That was the starting point of our conversation.
Gascia: It was wonderful. When I first visited your atelier, Samuel, you were doing many works with architectural materials like glass, but reconfiguring them as sonic sculptures—sculptures that vibrate, or through which sound is transduced. And those beautiful concrete loudspeakers you and Jona Wolf created as part of Transitory Sonic Bodies. Sometimes Samuel would just touch a heater or a light fixture or something like that, and it was vibrating. He’s really tuned in to the sonic potentials of architectural material—and how to release those potentials.
I knew Samuel was doing a residency at GlogauAIR in Kreuzberg. His Sonic Interstices project involved transducing sounds through contact microphones on windows, transporting sounds into the building, and also moving sounds from one part of the building to another—asking the residents of this art residency centre to think about the sounds in their spaces. It was a sonic study of a building. Samuel, you were also working with rugs and drapes—interior design elements that we don’t usually think about as active—and reconfiguring them. There were pink rug squares on the floor. These became sonic devices. I was really interested in that—how someone coming from the world of architecture, as Samuel is, is thinking about sound in relation to architectural materials, but also thinking about architecture itself as listening. That a building can listen, or an architectural element can be listening. That’s a question Samuel is asking in his work.
I was also very interested in Nicole’s practice, with its deep investigation into the idea of the membrane—membranas. Nicole did a PhD at MIT in the Media Lab, centred around conceptualising membranes as “apparatus for tuning into our vibrational reality.” I couldn’t put Nicole’s dissertation down. I was completely blown away by it. It was on philosophies of sound, membranal tunings, and tuning into a world of membranes. I highly recommend it.
I was totally fascinated by your ideas, Nicole. And I thought you’d enjoy working together. So that’s how the collaboration started.
Then there was this idea of the column that emerged, and maybe I could ask you a bit about that, because I’d also love to go into some of the ideas in Membranas (Nicole’s dissertation) during our conversation.
So—you were hanging out and thinking about architecture. And then at one point, there was this idea of the column. You had all these interesting references to columns. In architecture, there’s an entire history of the importance of the column across many architectural traditions: different forms of the column, different functions. But it’s typically a functional thing—it’s holding up a...
Nicole: ...it receives loads, it transmits energy.
Gascia: ...it transmits energy. I thought this was such a beautiful thing: that your work on Columna(s) exposes architectural elements that are not static, solid, or fixed, but energy-transmitting and receiving devices. That’s so interesting to think about—how architecture can contain and transmit energy. This work brings that idea to life in a beautiful way. Maybe you could say a little bit about that aspect of it?
Nicole: I think this is super beautiful because it goes to the genesis of the project—and again, why we came together and how this dialogue was super synergistic between the three of us. It was beautiful, like an improvisation distributed in time. It has everything to do with the notion of sending and receiving, which comes from membranes.
As Samuel was saying—from my end, I come with these ideas of membranes, and of going beyond the membrane as a physical structure to the membrane as a conceptual apparatus: a way to think with and to put things into practice. A conceptual apparatus to tune into our vibrational reality, through a mindset and an action that is membranal, resonant in essence, about a notion of sending and receiving. This in-betweenness, this resonance space—a communicative boundary. It’s important to understand that membranes can both separate and connect. They embody this duality, this ambiguity.
When we started our dialogue, we brought our ideas—clashing, resonating, colliding, merging, filtering—and we came to this idea.
At first, Gascia’s invitation was for us to come together and push the idea of membranes into an architectural structure—not only as a conceptual apparatus, or as a physical, literal membrane microphone (which I’ve been working on in different ways and manifestations), but to make it into an architectural system.
So, we started thinking about membranes, about structures that receive and send and contain energy in this way: energetic exchanges. We thought a lot about boundaries—in terms of walls, borders, interstitial spaces. But suddenly we shifted to thinking less about the façade, less about the boundary, and more about the inner, the core—the bone. How to make a bone that doesn’t ossify reality.
We started to imagine this foundational block: this structural, heavy element—but not in a material or relational way that is unitary or solid, but rather fragmented. We decided to create the column using bricks—like fragments, like blocks that can be added. This additive element became really important.
We were also thinking about sonic fragments. We understood that when we made a column out of fragments, we were also building a column of sounds. Each of these blocks contains a piezo or contact microphone; each is in itself a contact microphone. Each block also contains transducers—so each is also a speaker. We wanted to make this solid membrane in such a way that it embodies sending and receiving not only conceptually but also technically.
Creating Columna(s). Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz at Samuel’s atelier in Berlin. Photos by Gascia Ouzounian.
2 -Material Listening, Colour, and Collectivity
Samuel: The idea was to prototype a column—to build the first block, and also the column. How many columns can we build? This one could be the first prototype; we could have five columns or six columns. If you look at the column, it looks really homogeneous, but actually each block is different. Every block has a different interior structure that’s shaping the sound.
In one part of the performance, we put a microphone inside, dig in. We have a little hole so you can go inside and listen to the inner column. We were interested in what is not audible, how we’re working with a column we cannot hear—how much sound stays in the material.
Gascia: You can’t be inside the latex or silicone; you can’t be inside it and hear in that sense. But then you’re getting into it from the top.
Samuel: We always have two piezos and one speaker in each block. So right now, we have 32 piezos and 16 speakers in the structure. But the most interesting part for me in this research—also when we were listening with this block, with this sonic fragment... The sonic fragment was a reference to a book by Derek Jarman where he describes a fictional landscape with poets working in the ecology of sounds. They are brushing the earth, and there appear sounds from the past. These poets have field recording equipment, recording fragments. For that reason we call them ‘sonic fragments.’
Coming back to the microphone—the first sound we heard was the electrical sound that the piece has. This low frequency, like mmmmm, this 50Hz sound. This was the starting point—archiving its own sounds, connecting this signal and feeding it back. So, the piece is starting to listen to itself. We have a mechanism whereby the speakers and piezos are listening. What we are exhibiting now is a fragment of a recording of the piece sensing or listening to itself. We also modulate that with the help of Nico Daleman, who created a MAX patch that modulates the signal.
Nicole: It’s different voices, and depending on how or from where you listen to the piece, it changes.
Samuel: We’ll invite you later to walk around it, because your position also changes the frequencies.
Gascia: There’s a gradient—kind of lighter to darker colours—and also sonically there’s a gradient, right? In terms of frequency. Because when you listen to it, it goes higher.
Nicole: From a distance you hear the ensemble, which becomes this sort of humming, noisy singing, whistling. When you come closer to each block, you discover more. One thing that’s important for us, and which has to do with the membrane as a conceptual apparatus, is the idea of the unitary and the whole. A collectivity, but in a way where the members are super important—each of them individually makes the whole. It becomes this collective.
Gascia: I definitely had that impression when I was listening.
[To the audience] I don’t know if you all sensed that—it’s such a rich kind of collective world within the column, all the buzzing and speaking elements.
Samuel: For us, it was also important that it never ends. We finished here because of time or budget limitations—but we could continue.
Nicole: It’s a first moment, let’s say.
Samuel: It could go to blue, or dark blue, or other colours. In our research, we found a Columna Infinita—a non-ending column. That was our starting point. How can we create something that doesn’t stop at the ceiling? Something that may never be finished.
The colour component is important too. For both of us, colour is really important in our work. We resonate well on that… like, no black cables.
Gascia: Colour is really interesting in terms of your aesthetic philosophies. I think you’re both resisting the typical ‘sound art aesthetic’ of a black loudspeaker in a white room. Because of the histories of modernity that that links to and embeds, as Nicole once suggested. Maybe you could say something about that—because both of your works operate in this very colourful zone.
Nicole: Many times people say, “Oh, you talk a lot about sound, sound this, sound that,” but your work is super material, super colourful. And I’m like—exactly. Why do I need to detach sound from the rest of the world? This over-categorisation of reality is a figment someone invented. It’s arbitrary. It comes from modernism.
Where I come from, we don’t see reality like that. Things are more in scales of greys. Things are more resonant in this way, more in the logic of the borders of things—resonant membranes, not rigid worlds.
When you decide to use a white room with white cables and white speakers—because then they disappear—for me, that’s highly political. You’re saying and perpetuating something very important with that. It’s important to bring myself to the conversation, and to bring these colours, and to bring the things that are going to be in relationship with the sounds I’m proposing. Because, in the end, it’s not only about the sounds—it’s about the world contained in these intersections and exchanges.
This is what I mean when I talk about a vibrational imagination. It’s not only about creating worlds of the ephemeral or the invisible. It’s about understanding that everything is in constant relationship, resonance, and affectation. It’s about crossing boundaries and contaminations. These pollutions are super important for me.
Samuel Perea-Díaz and Nicole L’Huillier activating Columna(s). DAAD Gallery, April 23, 2024. Photos by Eunice Maurice.
3-Contamination and the Politics of Unintelligibility
Gascia: Can I ask something about contaminations? That idea feels really important—because you’re letting the noisy, fuzzy, buzzing, humming sounds of this...
Nicole: Ambiguity is part of it.
Gascia: Yeah. And I know, Nicole, that in some of your work, you’re thinking about listening devices—but in a very different way from how we conceptualise surveillance apparatus. The surveillance apparatus wants a clean signal and a clear idea of what’s being listened to. But your devices don’t give us a clean signal. You’ve suggested they’re more like anti-surveillance apparatus. Maybe you could say something about that?
Nicole: This is why some of the vibrational membrane microphones I’ve made are very colourful—because they want to be highlighted and extremely present, not disappear into the background.
Gascia: That’s a political idea too—how the apparatus is listening, and what kind of signal we receive.
Nicole: The colour even tunes into the protocols of the apparatus. These listening protocols... It can be highly problematic to create apparatuses for listening and use them in different spaces—with human and non-human forces, with energies travelling through the air, with no permission at all.
This is also why, for most of the activations I do—or installations—there’s a ritual element, a moment of asking for permission. It matters. And forgiveness also—not only permission—but it does matter a lot.
The membranes I’ve been using, creating, making, and working with are usually not high-fidelity devices. You can buy that in the store. What I’m looking for are elements that really weave our independent signals into collective noise—where we actually get intertwined with the vibrations of the wind, our voices, even the electricity, the grounding... all these things that are being contaminated, and that we can no longer separate.
So these apparatuses—becoming anti-surveillance devices—do the opposite of containment. Instead of separating and categorising, they do the opposite. And in that contamination, I propose we free ourselves—in this collective noise—and free ourselves from over-categorisation and control.
Gascia: I love that. It’s the opposite of the sonic fingerprint. It’s the sonic mess—the inability to disentangle and identify.
Nicole: It has a lot to do with the politics and poetics of unintelligibility.
Nicole L’Huillier in activation of Columna(s), DAAD Gallery, Berlin, April 23, 2024. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
Columna(s) - DAAD Gallery, Berlin, April 23, 2024. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
Eva Tisnikar with Columna(s) - DAAD Gallery, Berlin, April 23, 2024. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
4- Surlogical Soundings: Vibrational Breath and the Logics of the South
Gascia: Wonderful. I’m going to ask one last question, because as part of this performance, you brought out a flute, which I’m assuming is from the South Andes region. This is also part of the aesthetics that you’re developing—both of your sonic aesthetics, I think, are present here. Your interest in hearing the inaudible, Samuel, which is a big part of your work on sonifying data related to HIV/AIDS deaths, and in ultrasonic frequency zones that we, as humans, can’t necessarily hear. You have a whole work around this. And I think there’s a sonics of inaudibility here, as well as unintelligibility, and also this other sound world that enters with the flute.
Nicole, in your dissertation, you propose there’s another kind of musical logic you’re working with, and you coin the term Surlogical—a logics of the South. You reference George Lewis’s work and his article on Afrological and Eurological approaches to improvisation. You’re developing the idea of the Surlogical, a musical logic that comes from the South. And I think you’re bringing that into this space with the flute. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Nicole: Thank you for mentioning that and identifying it in our performance today. When I talk about the Surlogical, I was inspired by George Lewis’s work and proposition. And, let’s say, in continuation of that repo, I propose the Surlogical as a way of paying attention to other ways of coming together through sonic language.
I started playing drums as a kid—with my brothers and friends—and had these super bad punk and pop bands. But my sonic language was always about collectivity. It was always about collaboration. This is why today my practice is deeply rooted in relationships and ways of listening.
In the South Andean region, sonic togetherness is very much shaped by this notion. I like to say that in improvisation, or in these colour-response structures and architectures, it really changes the paradigm. Like I said earlier: the way we construct our worlds is also the way we relate to them, and that creates a paradigm. I don’t know which comes first—it’s the chicken-and-egg question.
But in the southern region, all of these kinds of togetherness have to do with call-and-response. And they’re rooted, primarily, in listening to each other in order to emerge together. In many rituals, ceremonies, and even just for entertainment and celebration, it’s all about collectivity, improvisation, and listening to one another in order to respond.
It’s a dual structure. There are many different ones depending on the community, sector, instrumentation—but many involve wind instruments. The Americas are often described as the continent of the winds (I’m generalising, of course). These little flutes—these pan flutes—they’re cane flutes. We call them carnitas—little cañas, little canes. They come from cane. It’s like a deconstructed panpipe. You have these panpipes that are tuned, and I usually use them in larger audiences to create collective improvisations. They’re super simple, and you don’t need to master them to participate.
This is a key part of the Surlogical way of thinking, or Surlogical togetherness: everyone is invited, in a truly expanded way. It’s about society and community—but this society also makes us question the limits of the social. Because these moments often happen outdoors. You actually pay attention to the wind. You listen to the clouds. You listen to the ground. And you’re in movement. You pay attention to how your movement makes the ground vibrate—and how the earth rises into the air and makes you breathe harder.
You breathe deeper, and you get more dizzy, and you enter into trance states. So again, it’s a whole contamination of all these signals coming together.
I have a very dear friend, an ethnomusicologist called José Pérez de Arce. He brings forward the idea of the flauta colectiva—the collective flute. It’s a flute that is actually distributed in space. We all become part of the collective flute. That’s why, in certain moments, I hand these little flutes to the audience. Because then we become the collective flute. It’s quite beautiful—because it doesn’t matter if you know how to play it. I just give you one, and you play it immediately. It’s super intuitive.
That’s why I like to carry these kinds of elements. They’re extremely simple and extremely inviting. It has everything to do with sound—because of how the air resonates within it—but also because of how I am breathing that air. It’s this inner and outer relationship—how we connect into this sonic membrane through exchanges and continuities.
For today’s performance, we were deciding things, and at some point we found this feedback. Samuel said, “Wow, this sounds like your flute.” And we were like, “Okay, yes, this is the relationship.” It didn’t make sense to articulate ourselves into the improvisatory system in a rigid way—but we wanted to be part of the system, not just absorbed by it. We are relating to this subject—the column and the fragments—and then it made sense that our way of articulating ourselves is through touch and through breathing. Which is basically what the column is also doing to us.
Gascia: Thank you so much. Maybe we can open it out to questions, responses, ideas.
Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz in conversation at DAAD Gallery Berlin, as part of Concrete Dreams of Sound.
5 - Q&A - Material Resonance and the Architecture of Listening
Eva Tisnikar: Can I very quickly continue on this notion of breathing? You had a different kind of way of relating to it than Nicole—because Nicole was slightly shorter, so she had to sort of breathe into it. And this idea of the body, and the soft body, and the body through time—it made me think of exhaustion. But exhaustion in both senses: like exhausting air, but also the exhaustion of carrying a burden you can no longer carry. So it’s this way of… and then you start deconstructing the body. So, is this body deconstructing or reconstructing itself?
There was something happening there, and I’m just thinking out loud—I don’t really have a big point. But there were also some other things I was thinking about, like Luce Irigaray and her book Elemental Passions. This idea that we are all air—we are beings in air. So this way of relating to the body through air was really beautiful. So, thank you.
Nicole: Thank you for that comment. What was the name of the book you mentioned?
Samuel: Aeropolis.
Eva: Also, another thing—sorry, just reading my notes. It was the spinal cord with nerves, right? It wasn’t just speakers and microphones. All of those were actually nerves we were interacting with. I thought that was super interesting. So, here’s a kind of question. There was a weird relationship I saw between the architectural drawings on the screen and the messiness and bodily fuzziness of the object—the wires and everything floating around it—and your performance with it. There was this very gentle interaction. I was wondering if you could talk more about the process of coming to this shape, this vision of the object, and the kind of architectural background or tools you were employing.
Samuel: It’s really complex—our conversation has been very intense. We were resonating really well together. So this was a beautiful invitation to collaborate with someone you resonate with and enjoy the process.
For me, thinking about this air or this materiality—this is also an unfinished object. What we saw today is just an activation. We’ve been activating the piece throughout the process—not just today. And I think at our next meeting, it will keep growing.
One really important moment was with Nico—we were testing it, and when you touch it, the sound changes. This kind of fragment, this kind of reference we had, the sound disappears.
Nicole: A relational entity.
Samuel: Yes. For me, it was something like—these blocks are also ephemeral. You hold a fragment in your hand, and then it disappears, and yet you still have it. That was a really important experience for me. Also, how activating one fragment—not just the 16 we showed today, but whether it's 30 or just 1 or 2—it still works. You’re scaling the block.
As for how we arrived at the shape—there were different factors. You mentioned fluidity. You saw that we didn’t want a straight column. We just placed a microphone stand for security—because we’re not going to be here for two weeks, and if someone comes and pushes it, the whole thing could fall. That’s why we added this for the exhibition—but we don’t need it for the work itself.
It was really important that the column doesn’t have to be perfectly upright. It’s moving—and that affects the sound, how it’s transmitted.
Nicole: I want to say something after.
Samuel: We started having this idea of the block as a productive unit—something we can produce in series, like using a CNC. We were making them ourselves, but we wanted something we could prototype. But we didn’t want uniformity. The invisible was changing. That middle part you saw was created in 3D and then cast. They look the same, but if you reverse them, it wouldn’t be a perfect column. There are different parameters we were prototyping and listening with.
The first prototype looked like what you saw. From there, it was important to resonate with the object—not just make something beautiful or expressive—but to listen, sound, and see. And from that, we decided, okay, now maybe it’s time to grow. How to arrive at the geometry was… I don’t know, Nicole, you wanted to say something?
Nicole: I want to say something about the materiality. So if you want to finish about form…
Samuel: Of course there’s an approach to form, but for us it was really about materiality. I want to play this video—this is when the material is still liquid…
Nicole: Process. Very satisfying. We should post it on Instagram—hashtag satisfying. But we don’t have a picture of pouring the material—that’s even more satisfying.
About the materiality: it’s also about why this material. Part of the form and structure came out of our relationship and dialogue with the material itself. I’ve been working with this type of material—different elastic structures. This is pigmented silicone, and I’ve also used latex and other rubbers.
For me, the material invites us to think about structure in a rubbery way. And that rubbery logic is a political decision, too—an intention to explore. What if we play with things that are more elastic, as I want reality to be? Let’s stretch it. Let’s stretch reality—as you also want it to be.
Samuel: Exactly. This is also architecture—the column fashioned like this. But also, when we stretch in this sense, the object starts to change. We didn’t play with that today, but you can change the geometry quite radically. You could flip the blocks or reverse them.
This was part of the architectural design—to prototype something we’re also questioning. We also built a wall from the same material. It’s quite solid—you can click them together. But this one was more about being with the material, listening to the material...
Nicole: ...and inviting pulsations to happen. These materials are not only elastic—they bring a rubbery narrative, an elastic narrative, into the fabric of reality.
Samuel: They bring a lot of noise.
Nicole: Also. But more importantly, they’re materials that pulsate. They receive our touch, our voices, and they bounce. So we’re talking about bounciness in relationships—it’s a bouncy listening. A rubbery listening. A rubbery listening apparatus that invites us to shake with it. It’s a trembling structure.
Samuel: For me, it was also really interesting that when we were prototyping, we didn’t have that much time to be with the final object. For example, the heaviness of the blocks changes the interaction with the piezos. Because the forces shift—and the piezos aren’t always mounted vertically or horizontally. Sometimes they’re diagonal. So the weight and tension created unexpected noise.
It wasn’t controllable. From the outside it looks very formal, but what’s happening inside is the opposite. I’ve had nightmares—like, this piezo is receiving this input, and the noise is coming from here, and now multiply it by 32. But this is part of the process—to work with these hidden walls we couldn’t control, but that are still there.
The performance was also a way of discovering the interconnections of the piezos. Of course we know where they are and how many—but in the end, things change. The materiality changes, the density changes.
Some things we wanted to do didn’t work—maybe they will in the future. One thing we wanted to do here (and I’ll share it, because it’s really beautiful) was to let the audience hear the 32 pieces at the same time. There are moments when you listen to the piece from outside, but we wanted you to be able to put on headphones and listen through all the columns at once.
Because in the end, the material glues them together. Every block is interconnected—they’re a body.
Nicole: The piece listening to itself.
Samuel: Yes. The piece listening to itself. The idea was for the audience to arrive, put on headphones, and see the column—while also sonically digging into the material. To test how listening through the material works. It’s not just about the surface—it’s about the possibilities of interconnection: piezos, cables… the 300 metres of cable we had...
Gascia: It’s an incredible—and I think very unique—object. And not only an object. As you said, it’s in development. It would be so nice to see how this progresses. We were even imagining—could you create an entire pavilion? A sonic pavilion like this?
I’m so sorry, but we’ll need to wrap here for now. Then we’ll head downstairs to listen to Transitory Sonic Bodies by Samuel and Jona Wolf.
Columna(s) (2024) by Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz. Installation view at DAAD Gallery, Berlin as part of Concrete Dreams of Sound Open Lab. Photo by Eunice Maurice.
ABOUT COLUMNA(S)
SONCITIES commissioned a new work by Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz, both sound artists with formal training in architecture. Their joint project Columna(s) stems from L’Huillier’s research in devising membranas: listening and/or sounding apparatus that use a variety of materials such as latex, silicone, and even biological materials to ‘activate a vibrational imagination’; Columna(s) equally builds on Perea-Díaz’s practice of probing the sonic potentials of architectural and interior design materials such as glass, concrete, light fixtures, rugs, windows, and walls, which are often reconfigured in unexpected ways.
Columna(s), which takes shape as a set of sixteen silicone blocks into which contact microphones and transducers have been embedded, engages ‘slippery materialities.’ It asks: how would our understanding of sound change if it was transmitted not through ‘perfect’ sound reproduction materials such as those used in hi-fi loudspeaker systems, but instead through wobbly, elastic, jelly-like matter and unstable forms? Further, how might architectural elements such as columns be imagined not only as functional forms, but also as energy-transmitting devices? Currently manifested as a single column, Columna(s) hints at the possibility of an entire pavilion made of sonic matter. As a structure that both emits sound and contains it within dense silicone blocks, it invites an intimate listening, playing with the idea that there is a sound space that is not fully accessible to humans and available more to architecture itself, as though architecture could listen; and suggesting a relational listening with architecture. As such, Columna(s) gets to the heart of the Concrete Dreams of Sound project. Through a process of dialogue, designing, testing, and prototyping, it investigates the sonic capacities of experimental materials, while also asking larger questions about the relationship of sound to architecture, and the potential of sound and listening to reconfigure architectural practice.
Columna(s) (2024) by Nicole L’Huillier and Samuel Perea-Díaz
Text: Gascia Ouzounian
Max Patch: Nico Daleman
Production assistance: Ina Richter
Commissioned by SONCITIES
Concrete Dreams of Sound Open Lab co-curated by Dahlia Borsche and Gascia Ouzounian