Bill Fontana
Somerset House, London, UK
Southend Bell
The pulsating heart of River Sounding, the new installation by Bill Fontana at Somerset House, is a slowly throbbing and engulfing wave of bass. At the core of the underground spaces in which the piece is installed, the sound piece seeps from a subwoofer like a primordial, physical presence. River Sounding recalls times and rhythms beyond the familiar; or, the ebb and flow of tidal forces of the piece’s main source: the River Thames. On stepping out into Somerset House’s subterranean passageways (which are usually closed to the public), every acoustic presence pierces and enfolds – as if the time spent inside, surrounded by the bass wave, sharpened the sense of listening. Gurgling water, tolling bells, the solitary whistle of a buoy, and hums and vibrations punctuate the spaces. The river portrayed by Fontana is dark, unexpected and unpredictable; its rhythm could well follow the pace of verses such as ‘sweet Thames run softly’, loaded with twisted symbolisms in the river section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). River Sounding is a portrait of the river as a state of mind, as well as a portrait in absentia – or in progress – of the people who look at it every day, and of their stories.
Gravesend Pier
In this piece Fontana transforms sound into place through the exploration of geographical and mental territories, and ultimately of listening. His research began in 2007 with the study of maps of the areas crossed by the Thames. Produced by the Somerset House Trust and by new British music organisation Sound and Music, the project culminated last November in two weeks spent by the artist recording sounds and capturing images along the river, between Teddington Lock in the west and the estuary in the east. Finally the Thames – which, in the 19th century, flowed into and along Somerset House and was only separated from it in 1864 with the construction of the Victoria Embankment – returns to the building by means of sound.
Whistle buoy at Trinity House
Spread across 64 audio channels and 70 speakers, and accompanied by minimal video projections, River Sounding takes the form of a non-linear journey across the storerooms, coalholes and light-wells of Somerset House. For his broad acoustic palette, Fontana not only sourced sounds using acoustic microphones, he employed hydrophones and accelerometers (devices that capture mechanical vibrations and convert them in electric signals). Familiar sounds –such as the tolling of bells and the splashing of water – merge with ambient noises from the National Maritime Museum and with the vibrations of Tower Bridge, the Millennium Bridge and of steam engines from the Steam Museum at Kew Bridge.
Gravesend Pier
As always in Fontana’s installations – think of early examples such as Oscillating Steel Grids Along the Brooklyn Bridge (1983), when he channelled the vibrations of the Brooklyn Bridge, shaken by the traffic, on the façade of World Trade Center One – the artist intervenes in a place by bringing to it audio signals from outer sources. Unlike that other pioneer of sound installation, Max Neuhaus, who enhanced the acoustic qualities of a place by working on the very sounds that belonged to it, Fontana introduces sound into a space as a differential force, appearing by means of displacement. In River Sounding too, it is up to each listener to trace their own paths across disparate sounds, underground rooms and passages. The nature of the piece lies in the ways each one develops their own ways of listening: which in turn brings to recalling, making or imagining stories and journeys across and about the building, and the river.
Daniela Cascella
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