Viv Corringham

Shadow walks in Nodar

I am very interested in people’s relationship with place,especially familiar places and home. For the past four or five years I have been travelling and making sound-work that responds to the specific character of a place and its residents. I see this work-which I call “Shadow-walks”- as a sound portrait of a place and its people through the experience and memories of those who live there, as well as through the sounds particular to their chosen places and through my own sung response to these places.

My residency at Binaural in Nodar was another chapter in this on going project. In this village of 24 people in the mountains of Northern Portugal, ten volunteers took me on their “special” walk, a walk repeated many times and with distinct meaning or significance for that person. An initial walk with the person along their selected route, in which our conversations were recorded, was followed by my solo walk in which I attempted to sense my previous companion’s traces on the walk and to make these audible through improvised singing in the location.This process was repeated for each person’s walk and the various recordings were then edited into a single composition.

As I walked I collected objects from the routes, which were later presented with the sound-work. Objects removed from their context and displayed in a different place seem to take ona strong physical presence, embodying imaginary stories and creating a visual portrait of a location based on detritus and what was left behind.

Viv Corringham is a British sound artist, based in London and Rochester, Minnesota who has worked and broad cast internationally since the early 1980s. Articles about her have appeared in several magazines and she has been broadcast on radio (BBC Radio 3 and 4, Resonance fm, WFMU…) and TV (BBC Channel4). Her work has been commissioned by some of the most important sound art festivals, such as Sound works Festival (Cork, Ireland), Hearing Place Sound Art Festival (Melbourne, Australia),Placard Headphone Festival (London, UK), Sound Art Museum (Rome, Italy), etc.