Tanya V. Abelson
Tanya V. Abelson—Argentina—is an artist working in sculpture, luthiery, and fashion. They graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2018. Based on archival research, Tanya examines objects with biographical references through an exploratory process. Their work and collaborative projects have been exhibited in Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Argentina, and Brazil. In 2020, they were awarded the Zonta Art Contemporary Prize by the Zonta Club Frankfurt II Rhein-Main. In 2023, they participated in the CIRCA PRIZE and were part of the residency scholarship program of The Cultural Foundation of Hesse (Hessische Kulturstiftung) in London.
Luis Garay—Colombia/Argentina—lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. He holds a Master of Arts in Applied Theater Studies with a focus on Performance and Choreography from the Justus Liebig University Giessen. Luis has a keen interest in the contrast between openness and concealment and invites the audience to experience unconventional forms of performance. His work has been shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Transform Festival in Leeds, the Kyoto Art Centre, and Centre Pompidou Metz, among others.
DIAPASONN is an investigation into tuning forks, realized as part of the Wöhr + Reinheimer Foundation’s scholarship program, with the support of the Hessische Kulturstiftung. The piece was written by Luis Garay and performed by Tanya V. Abelson, Dylan Kerr, and Julián Galay, with the participation of Luzie Meyer on November 2, 2024, in Berlin.
Luis Garay In your most recent projects—including DIAPASONN—there is a leap forward not only aesthetically and conceptually, but also towards the practical and useful, for example, when you create instruments or items of clothing. I am interested in the specific materials you choose: rubber and metal. How did you arrive at this choice? What are your thoughts on it?
Tanya V. Abelson For me, rubber and metal function like transmitters. If bodies—in a sculptural sense—are transmitters, then how they resonate, what they transmit, both symbolically and physically, depends on their material. In this context, I examine rubber and metal as opposites, as the two ends of a channel, so to speak. On the one hand, there is this very quiet place of rubber—quiet because rubber is so heavy and flexible, and in large quantities, it becomes unwieldy and dense. Metal, on the other hand, seems more obvious and penetrating; it spontaneously attracts more attention. Despite this, I find both materials share a certain malleability that I want to explore. To come back to the idea of transmission: Sound, as an inherent property of bodies—in this case, made of metal and rubber—has always played a crucial guiding role in my relationship with the materials I use in the creation of sculptural musical instruments and aim to bring to sound. The act of making these materials resonate, and thus hearing them, is something that drives me.
Garay That’s beautiful—the apparent muteness of the rubber in contrast to the shrill metal, as if the objects of the world have an acoustic and vibrating presence, and you reveal this presence by transforming these materials into instruments or music.
Abelson Yes, from there, I went into luthiery, instrument–making, and crossing techniques. However, there was a significant shift in my approach after discovering cymatics. Cymatics explores the visualization of sound and was one of the cornerstones of the exploratory research I was doing in London. As part of this investigation, I looked at wave types, currents, frequencies, and synthesizers, both in terms of their specific properties and their modes of operation. In this process, I have always been particularly interested in sound production. The various disciplines such as classical physics, quantum physics, and metaphysics have helped me to understand how different frequencies unfold their ability to shape-shift in the material being analyzed. Cymatics, as the science of visualizing sound, has opened a door for me to the different worlds in which tuning forks resonate.
Garay What kind of tuning forks are these, and how did you get into sound healing?
Abelson Tuning forks are instruments for measuring vibrations per second. Depending on their proportions, they are able to maintain a certain vibration, that is a certain frequency; in music, this would be a tone. Here, they function as instrument tuners or single-tone instruments. However, today, tuning forks are used in an analogous way in various other fields: from traditional medicine—in ultrasound treatments that dissolve vascular stones—to high-speed measurement and sonics. Based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, they are used in alternative approaches that adopt a holistic perspective in sound healing therapies to treat various physical and mental symptoms. These treatments usually involve two defined roles: that of the practitioner and that of the patient. The instruments used are tuning forks or quartz bowls, which are utilized precisely because of their sustained sound frequencies. What these instruments activate is related to the vibrational field and the acoustic mode. The power of the temporal duration of their sound has the ability to resonate directly with our own finitude. I was inspired by Lygia Clark’s video work Memória do Corpo (Memory of the Body) from 1984, where encounters take place through sensory experiences. I myself am particularly interested in exploring collective sound experiencesand finding ways to enlarge the field the tuning forks activate—expanding the sound and broadening theexperience. I want to create a setting in which the different facets of these sounds can be experienced together. To do this, I operate the tuning forks and compose synthetic sounds, but in my role as moderator, I also directly influence their texture. When I think about it, I have the feeling that this experience, which develops into a sound laboratory, can only truly be experienced on stage.
Garay What interests me about your role in group mediation is the way you take on an experimental, speculative, and provisional role. But I would like to move on to the lecture you sent me, The Transmutation of Attitudes by Manly P. Hall, which points out that there are constant processes of transmutation already taking place in our bodily combustion processes. I would like to ask you again about this aspect of the shape-shifting you mentioned earlier …
Abelson The chemical combustion of food, the churn of that energy, is poetic and very concrete. The emotional labor we have to expend to function socially is enormous, and maintaining that energy requires a high level of efficiency. Balancing that demands a lot from both our bodies and our minds. And then, there is a kind of background noise—a state of constant alertness—that we find ourselves in, which collectively leads to a constant acceleration of our reality. In contrast, an empathetic encounter that encourages us to listen to our inner voice rather requires an openness to the world. For me, changes in form, which I investigate, can represent a first step towards abandoning one’s own entrenched position in order to encounter something new and more subtle.
Garay What you say leads me to another question: we are in the process of understanding mental health as something collective rather than individual. But ideas of healing or harmony can easily be instrumentalized by neoliberalism and end up driving self-centeredness even further.
Abelson It’s a topic and a language that can easily be trivialized and is often associated with the term “New Age”. For sure, this represents a new lifestyle, and while there might be some overlap, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the actual approach of the concepts I’m interested in. The original approach can be traced deep back to the roots of human civilizations. Notions of health in Chinese medicine are based on the ideas of deficit and excess for each of the organs that help to regulate the whole. They focus on energy. Like the meridians in the body that guide the needles in acupuncture, these are the points wherethe tuning forks go in those healing techniques that work through frequency vibrations. Deepening the concept of movement makes me think of culture as a special guiding medium, of music as a great conductor, and I find it captivating to incorporate these small and personal experiences into a performance that revolves around the idea of accessing something commonly known. It’s like coming back to oneself, rather than revolving around oneself.
Garay I find it interesting that the two ideas you just mentioned are similar, yet almost opposite. If one understands the return to oneself as a return to a kind of vibrational field that was already there, then that is very much the opposite of revolving around oneself, which would be more of an ego trip. The latter is more in line with this idea of “selfcare” which came up on the American West Coast, imbued with a certain self-centeredness in it.
Abelson When I think about our health as a whole, the excesses are very clear: we are living in a state of fear. The post-pandemic human experience, along with the wars and genocides of our time, brings so many existential questions to the fore that cast doubt on everything, the collective and the personal. I also often think about how difficult it is for me to transfer spiritual concepts from Latin America that can allow for a particular understanding of nature into the European context. I think of resistance across the board. This is where my need to create experimental sounds in a performance and share some of the magic of the ritual and its intimacy with the audience comes from.
Translation from Spanish into English:
Yanne Horas, Berlin—Buenos Aires—Frankfurt am Main
