This performance work draws on Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977) by Jacques Attali, using selected readings from the text as a conceptual and performative starting point. The work reflects on Attali’s proposition that music functions as a subculture of society, one that precedes and helps generate economic structures. Rather than reproducing conventional musical forms, the performance engages with noise as a process of decomposition, disruption, and resistance to established notions of musicality.
Through this approach, the work asks how musicality itself structures dominant ways of seeing and understanding sound, and what alternative social and political meanings might be revealed through the organisation of noise. It explores how musicality and noise coexist and collide within performance, and how this tension reflects broader mechanisms through which music is produced, organised, and perceived.
Curator Angeliki Chaido Tsoli notes that “Bubbly Creek reminds us of the harsh realities of industrial capitalism, labour exploitation, and disproportionate concentrations of wealth in America.” Within this context, the performance situates sound as a critical tool for examining systems of production and power.
The work was presented at the Bubbly Creek Performance Art Assembly at dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery, Chicago, United States, on 17 June 2019, and was curated by Angeliki Chaido Tsoli.
Special thanks are extended to the artist’s family and the Theatre Academy – University of the Arts Helsinki for supporting the travel to Chicago, as well as to Angeliki Chaido Tsoli and Joseph Ravens for their hospitality and generous support during the residency.
Image credit:
Nicolina Stylianou, I Think in Animals, Bubbly Creek Performance Art Assembly, dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery, Chicago (IL), USA, 2019. Photograph courtesy of James R. Southard (Under-Main).
