Gill Valves
Live community-activated, site-responsive performance at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska
Julia Edith Rigby—viola, piano, pipe organ, video projection mapping, field recordings from a sea cave (https://vimeo.com/802569624?share=copy)
Kafele Williams—trumpet @kafelewilliams
During the performance, audience members were invited to interact with the pipe organ, to sit back-to-back with the organ and experience sound on a seismic scale. We experimented with movement, sensing, sounding, listening and bone conduction, co-creating a community-activated performance.
November 8, 2023
Many thanks to The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska for lending their organ, and to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts for supporting this project.
Gill Valves was a community-activated performance at The Church / Art Space in Omaha, Nebraska, in which audience members were invited to sit back-to-back with a pipe organ and experience sound on a seismic scale. We experimented with pressing our heads to the pipe organ body, with listening through the bones of our face.
Gill Valves emerged from Rigby’s research with swell sharks at Omaha's Henry Doorly Aquarium. Rigby spent her residency watching the sharks, playing viola for them from the walkways above their tanks, and learning about their breathing mechanisms as a means of finding new ways to imagine and re-imagine the pipe organ. Thinking about shark gills and flue pipes, about inhalation and exhalation, generated recontextualizations of pipe organ mechanics and sound generation.
Research with the pipe organ research expanded to include other animals and their sensory worlds. The project experimented with more-than-human means of listening, with moving beyond the realm of cochlear vibration into the realm of bone conduction. Taking cues from elephants—who communicate via low-frequency rumbles heard through the pacinian corpuscles of their fatty, sensitive feet—and baleen whales—who communicate long distance via low-frequency calls and amplify infrasonic sounds via their unique skull morphologies—the project aimed to cultivate new ways of listening via flesh contact with the organ body.
People were invited to engage with the pipe organ, to contribute to the soundscape via their movements and interactions, to contemplate sound as spatial force, pipe organ as proto-subwoofer, and sensory sensitivity in relation to movement. People were invited to move freely and observe the ways our spatial movements shaped not just our perception of the soundscape but also the very nature and creation of that ephemeral soundscape. The project was a means of tuning into our surroundings as well as to one another.
Gill Valves catalyzed transformations by which the viewers / listeners became the performers, creating a space for collective listening and collective improvisation. How might these kinds of actions with a pipe organ—this megafaunal, multi-esophageal screamer—create space for social practice, for feeling our ways through collective grief processes and political actions? For radical noticing and regenerative world-making? How can we bring these conversations with pipe organs into relationships with more-than-humans and more-than-human worlds? How might these relationships catalyze new means of of careful listening and strengthening systems of care?