Miha Horvat feat. Aphra Tesla • TONSPUR FOR UKRAINE

Photo © Tesla/Horvat

How did the collaboration start?   A phone call. Curator. Invitation. Theme: Ukraine. Opening in 48 days. Our discussion: synchronicity, Wikipedia, geography and a found photo. There are only two colours. And many associations. Wheat and sky. Loudspeakers and posters as instruments. He — the Captain; she — Dersu. We, the composers. Our first ALBUM. And a cinematic masterpiece.

What is ALBUM?   The voice of an amphibian living in an open oracle. A dialogue, a play between two grown-up babies who once lived in each other’s arms, in cradles. Sometimes abandoned, now in each other. They shat and pissed anywhere, and shrieked vowel-like repetitions. ALBUM is a monument to the ineffability of early childhood, to the nature of freedom. The latter is the cause of all cultural deficit. The ALBUM set in TONSPUR is a special cradle as it shifts and tilts due to the surplus of the shocks of small and big wars — into a diametric opposite: a graveyard. Each person passing-by here is surely heading that way.

What does ALBUM want to express?   The question is not what it wants to express, the question is how to avoid self-analysis, self-historicizing, self-questioning, a violent monologue that aggressively starts wars within ourselves. How can one live in a box, or rather: I don’t understand people who live in a box, as Dersu wonders. The regime is a box. So how to leave the box, ways to get away from the closed cycles of rationality. TONSPUR and ALBUM as an unenclosed situation. As an incompleteness, as an evolving and emerging relationship. As a score that we create together.

Why Dersu Uzala, why this cinematic masterpiece, as you call it?   The growing respect, deep friendship and tolerant understanding between people from completely different backgrounds and ways of life is a much needed example for our times. And clearly, the inspirational nature of this visually-sonic and dramaturgical masterpiece of cinematic art … speaks for itself. 

The viewer’s reading position is different of course, different from, e.g. Slovenians in Vienna, the Balkans in Vienna, Ukraine in Vienna?   And as an ALBUM in physical and public space, when the spectator listens to it and when s/he flips through the booklet of posters of this sound-musical product. The ALBUM is made and exists for here and for now, in this location, at different climatic moments and together with the listener who is moved by it or meets it or comes to start getting to know it.

Miha Horvat, born in Maribor, Slovenia in 1976, lives and works in Maribor.
Aphra Tesla, born in Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia in 1977, lives and works in Maribor, Slovenia.

Text written by the Council for the Detection of Crime in the Arts – read

ALBUM
8-channel soundwork, 7-part series of A1 images
duration ca. 8’24”
concept, compositions, A1 images Tesla/Horvat
voice Miha Horvat & Aphra Tesla
editing, mixing Peter Szely
photo posters Ilya Dobrych / CC-BY-SA-2.0
graphic design posters
installation set up
production TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien
artistic director Georg Weckwerth
special thanks Council for the Detection of Crime in the Arts & Sara Nuša Golob Grabner

TONSPUR_passage | Micro Museum for Sound
MQ Wien
5.8.24–1.9.24
daily 10–20 h