Singing Wires
Ewa Jacobsson Magdaléna Manderlová

Just standing there for a few minutes. Walking beside the walls, speaking into the niche, hitting the handrail and stomping down. The space answers differently each time – stretches out the sound, returns the punch, muffles the movement or redirects it elsewhere. To listen in means to conceive what the space consists of, what it is surrounded by, who dwells in it, and which of its parts still resonate together. 

This is the perceptive aim Magdaléna Manderlová and Ewa Jacobsson enter the space of the Palmovka Synagogue with. They focus on the individual elements of the space, testing their acoustic properties by letting them reverberate. The architectural features and found objects become a spatial site-specific sound composition. Long strings, resonating objects, and recordings played in the space create relations between the architecture and furnishings, and allow for a perception of the building as a sizable musical instrument to be tuned up in order to let sounds and voices from its past resonate again. 

Magdaléna Manderlová and Ewa Jacobsson met in Oslo, where both of them live and work. Their artistic practice differs in their individual generational experiences, but they are connected by their interest in deep listening, field recordings, and ephemeral natural processes. Their collaborative practice is site-specific, interdisciplinary, and participative. They use field recordings to create sound and music compositions, they use recorded audio and acoustic instruments to intervene in galleries, public space, and the landscape. Listening – and recording – in their practice is not a simple tool to document a locus, but a way to get in contact with a place, observe the ways it changes, and to get closer to the experiences of those who inhabit it. 

author: Jakub Frank