Exhibition Opening
September 30th, 2025, 7 pm
Opening Sound Performance
7:30 pm
Alanas Gurinas is an interdisciplinary artist who creates in the field of sonic performances and audiovisual installations. In his practice he explores sound as a textural phenomena, the themes of ephemerality and relations between easily recognisable, hearable and unhearable objects and spaces.
Fragile acoustics, slipping through grip, a fleeting moment –
\
\
dissolved narrow spider threads merging with space, like a translation tool which converts thoughts of joyful temporal experiences, void, inbetweenness into the sensoric language.
If you are lucky you find yourself inside the sound, as if in the belly of those objects, the belly turns into the volume of the space. At the same time the vibration of the room itself is just an architectural situation in which all are participants.
Exhibited objects are performers with their own physicalities, characters and tensions, filling the space with interplays. Through what parameters do we familiarize ourselves with surroundings?
Shared Interiors – Text by Gabriela Gordillo
Angela: I see the lamp that is lit. My interior is a mess. But I light myself up.
(Lispector, 2014)
The notion of datetime, refers to a convention that exceeds the limits of this room. An array of potential meeting points into the past and future. At the heart of these coordinates is the lived experience, the event in real time beating in the present.
From September 30th to October 10th the exhibition date, time by Alanas Gurinas took place in the artist run space bb15. It began as a sound performance that would set the exhibition’s state for the following days:
As the performance happens, a new tempo arrives to the room, which vibrates with the mechanical events that take place, turning it into a resonance chamber. The sensation of being at the interior changes the character of the space and our being together inside it. We become co-participants of a situation that does not point to external rhythms, but to the parameters inside. Everyone remains calm after the unnoticed end of the performance. The room as we know it seems to be transformed.
In the exhibition space, several elements are somehow animated. A small circular piece removed from the white wall rotates in slight friction with a translucent paper that partially covers the open hole that it revealed. Inside, there are cables and electronic components from the intercom that connects to the entrance door. This piece “untitled”, exposes an unexpected layer of a solid construct in the threshold of what is hidden and shown in the room’s structure. Behind this gesture is a questioning of the status quo regarding what is allowed, noticed and unnoticed. In the extraction of the wall’s piece and its playful reconfiguration, the work points to the transparency and fragility of its structure.
Covering what is inside draws attention to the surface and to external issues. The membrane provides a shape, texture and appearance that disguises the interior. Sometimes it protects sensitive matter such as organs, fibers, liquids or chaotic thoughts. The interior might be made of a material that requires specific conditions. In the novel “A Breath of Life”, Lispector uses a metaphoric membrane to describe the nuances of its main character:
Author: travelling through this book while keeping Angela company is tricky like going on a journey with the pure yolk of an egg cupped in the palm of my hand without making it lose its invisible but real surrounding – invisible, but there’s a skin made of almost nothing encircling the delicate yolk and maintaining it without breaking so it can keep being a round yolk. (Lispector, 2014)
The transparency of the membrane hints at how to handle the interior and how to interact with it as a whole. The membrane can be what separates two media, or indeed the one that joins, by allowing contact through contiguity. When letting some parts pass and filtering others, it is a medium of inter-communication. A house has a door to enter and go out, as well as an intercom with an auricular that delivers ones voice to someone else’s ear. Interior and exterior can communicate and intertwine through semi-transparent interfaces. The opposite of transparency happens with our current technology, made of black boxes that disguise the inside for the sake of causing straightforward interactions. This design keeps us away from thinking that we can open, reuse, modify or extract its parts, creating an alienation towards the devices that shape our daily life.
In a different corner of the gallery, a smartphone with plugged headphones lays on the bench. Near them, a thin sine wave appears and disappears periodically. From its title, the piece “noon” suggests the recurrence of natural and cosmic rhythms, as it sounds and hides, leaving space for rest and recommencement. The sound is actually coming from the headphones, an interface meant to play audio directly into the ear, as a private space for listening. Used towards the outside, it opens a counter space, re-defining the room as a shared inner experience. Behind this pitch are three sinewaves playing the C6 chord (C-1047Hz), the most common chord across music genres for its structural simplicity, being the fundamental of the western harmonic system. This tone might be perceived as a blurred memory or unconscious inner voice, connected to all the moments where it has been heard.
Across the room, the piece “a slightly light tone” spreads out over five modules of a fully exposed mechanism, each consisting of a blank paper suspended from the ceiling, carrying a gallon of water. The weight creates the tension that causes the paper to vibrate, behaving like a speaker. The resulting sound variates in frequency due to the size of the paper and the tension applied, while it keeps the overall timbre of water and a sense of transparency. A vibration motor attached to each hanging paper exposes its resonant frequency of and sets a rhythmic pattern in motion. Interestingly, these motors are the ones used for haptic feedback in mobile phones, in their “mute function”. In this piece, away from their plastic case, these vibrators juxtapose with new materials to generate harmonic tones in an open composition. The hanging blanks can also be called membranes, which make a cut in the air and reveal its movement, amplified by sound.
For the possibility of vibration and resonance to vibration, there needs to be a space, a body or medium that hosts and propagates the received signal. In his writing about resonant matter, Lutz Keopnick calls this aspect “hospitality”:
To resonate is to echo with something, is to enable or make an echo. It is to give an echo to something, to let something come and arrive, let something in and take place, so as to enable the kind of connection, attachment, and reciprocity we call resonance, whether it is strictly physical or be dazzlingly affective in nature. (2)
While we normally look into the sound source, the moving object or the speaker’s voice, we forget about the recipient, the resonant material or the listener as entangled agents in a process of reciprocity. The notion of hospitality brings awareness of what surrounds the “sound figure”. When the sound event happens, a room, an ear amplifies and embraces it. Its shape has the borders of everything that it touches. Our first experience of sound was through the vibration of water. In a space with no distance, but full immersion. Such a state relates to the notion of being at the interior, in contact and fully surrounded. This, being the most archaic personal perception throws hints around our relations to sound and space.
The spread of media devices such as headphones and noise cancelling tools promise to enhance our individual experience and connect us to ourselves by isolating us from the outside. In doing this, they block the sound of the public, the “unwanted”, “uncomfortable”, the “unacceptable”, raising the threshold of whatever that is. As much as it creates a temporary enjoyable experience, creating sound shields does not seem to be the way to better soundscapes. If we cancel our possibility to listen and close ourselves in the context of a common space, how should we find ways of being together? How should we develop politics of listening and sounding? How will we ever know which are the unheard voices if we refuse to listen to anyone but ourselves? A refusal to listen augments the probability of clashes, misunderstandings or even violence.
In the exhibition date, time, we see the dismantling of the tools that offer designed modes of communication. By re-inventing their use and opening up their opaque interfaces, their primary function transformed into a collective sensory experience. Sharing the interior, informally named as “opening up” requires a safe space, a sense of trust, conditions for symbiotic control and unpredictability. Alanas Gurinas creates this in an exhibition that propagates and resonates within us.
• Lispector, Clarice, “A breath of life” penguin, Modern Classics, 2014
• Koepnick, Lutz, “Resonant Matter, Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality”, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2021
Thanks to Sam Bunn for his thoughtful editorial accompaniment and to Alanas for sharing insights into his work.