Body Orchestra: work-in-progress is a showcase of audio tracks and video projection by Joanna Penso. This audio-visual installation utilises sound in an unconventional way by remixing recordings from contact microphones on the surface of the skin, offering insights that we would only otherwise hear if one presses their ear to another’s skin surface; altogether an intensely intimate act.
As we re-enter public spaces we now have altered perspectives on bodily shame; a cough on a bus has a weighted gravitas which previously was only heard as a slight inconvenience, now is perceived as threatening mortal danger, loss of income and social feedback.
This selection of work has been created with the aim of making art from abject, socially unacceptable sounds, whilst hovering around the point of transition on the sliding scale of dissonant to harmonic. Employing bodily sounds as orchestral instruments, Body Orchestra asks the question: how tolerant are we of each other now that our bodies are in close physical proximity again?