02/07/2025
Exhibit: Up Worlds, Down Words
Exhibited work: Truncated I-II
(Japanese pull saws, Arduino coded Solenoid instrument, timer, Installed)
Collaboration with Caleb Witvoet and Sophia Lengle
May to June 2025
Back in 2024, Caleb invited me to collaborate on a new installation for a show Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn. His vision was a fully accessible skating ramp from scratch using self-made plywood, the shape created, resembled the arches of the chapel, which could be used during opening hours.
By 2025, that initial idea to create a soundscape had grown into a much more real one, rooted in listening, building, collecting, and shaping context by the site-specific material in the chapel.
The resulting work, Truncated I–II, features Japanese pull saws used during the production of the skate ramp, now attached to an Arduino-driven clockwork. Every half hour, the mechanism played two interlocking rhythms, saw-blades clanking and dancing with the wood that once resisted them. This acompanied Caleb's painstakingly quality crafted skateramp and materials combined with Sophia's intricate weavings located on the windowsills of the chapel's arched windows.
“Truncation” becomes a metaphor: the act of cutting down as a cycle that never truly ends. A phantom of growth. A reminder that construction and destruction are always intertwined. What once was tree becomes structure, and yet the echo of its life lingers.
The work is a perfect example of in situ creation, DIY, cacophonic, arythmical and almost impulsive. But the tormented shape of the piece I left alive, for I think it represents truncation best.
I’m deeply grateful to the crew at Hotel Maria Kapel, and to Caleb and Sophia. I could never have imagined learning the intricacies of Arduino coding or constructing such a machine on my own, it also finally initiated my possibility to make self sequencing instrumental sculptures: a technique I wanted to practice for so long, opening gateways to new sonic sculptures.
