Cătălin Crețu and Ideilagram propose an exploration of life in an apartment block through sounds
Cătălin Crețu is a composer, whose major interest is the studying and writing electronic music. He has a double specialty, both in engineering (he graduated from the Technical University of Petroșani) and in music (he graduated from the National University of Music of Bucharest. Ideilagram is an association preoccupied with studying architecture and city and, what is more, “one that brings together people who share ideas and visions, and fosters the interdisciplinary dialog”. Their exhibition fragment explores the distinctive or overlapping sounds of life in an apartment block.
Vlad Odobescu: What sort of experience do you propose to visitors?
Ideilagram: We propose two sound installations: “Voices” and “Neighborhood sounds”.
A translucent membrane wrapping the core and all experimental pods. It is through this installation – a filter-like framework – that the actors’ voices are heard by all visitors walking this passage before entering the installation pods.
In one of the pods visitors will find hanging 6 big felt cylinders in which they are invited to enter and rediscover certain sounds related to housing, sounds that will spark memories or conflicting states of mind.
Cătălin Crețu: A symbolic time travel through sound in forgotten dwelling spaces. While architecture, materials, technologies, and various approaches and standards have been altered, the sound flows remained unchanged, maybe they became denser. We live again older or more recent acoustical moments and states while walking in a sound-and-spatial labyrinth.
How did you come up with this solution?
IDG: Following the interviews we took last year, we found out some major actors that shape our homes; they are the developer, the administration, the architect and the dweller (or the end-user, as it is often called). From among them, the user barely interacts with the major actors, so, his or her voices are rather passive. Hence, we wanted ‘to make their voices heard’; each voice illustrates a large range of controversial issues, interests and aspirations that are displayed in parallel as collages cut out from these interviews. We mainly focused on the message, so we decided to completely sever them from any image or context and present it only as sound against an abstract background.
Close or remote human vicinity related to the built space or the city is one of the defining components of collective housing. When we shaped the structure according to the research results we also defined some essential themes and thought we could illustrate them as a two-term relation through sound. Sounds have been selected to illustrate topics like periphery vs. downtown (representing the relationship to town); seclusion vs. openness (relationships within the housing ensemble); old (communal spaces and their administration in the older dwellings before 1990) vs. new housing (after 1990); urban vs peri-urban facilities (various kinds of facilities for collective housing); diversity vs. segregation (the way in which spaces are inhabited; human factor); individuality in community (relationship between private, personal space and communal, shared space).
C.C. Sounds belong to daily live as a housing component, being either allies or foes to the dweller, a reason for joy or sadness, of meditation or distress. Our relationship to the soundscape depends on education, profession, state of mind, respect towards your next-door neighbor. To exemplify the old, we built traces of sound in the symbolic space.
What do you think a good place for living in should look like?
IDG: This question is rather personal and it’s six of us in the team! Here are, though, three answers:
A good space to live in means a space that can accommodate me! Where I and whatever I do or I am going to do can fit in. Thus, it should be a flexible, adjustable, accessible space full of light. It should be a space that can be reached easily and from where I can reach places which are dear to me.
It can be any place that you may instinctively call ‘home’. It’s that comfortable space where you are safe, sleep well and feel free of concerns. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a house or an apartment. It’s a place in which you feel at home with yourself.
It’s a space where my family and feel well. A place in which we can read, monkey about, cook, play, listen to music, enjoy the company of friends. A place from which I can easily dash out to town either by foot or by bike or by public transport.
CC: “It’s a space that protects our privacy, the clean zone in which I can think, create freely, where my quietness is not perturbed, in which my mind can fly unrestrained.
