Alexis O’Hara
Squeeeeque A.K.A. the improbable Igloo

The Canadian artist Alexis O’Hara has been active as a slam poet and experimental musician since the end of the 1990s. With the Squeeeeque igloo, she has built an interactive audio sculpture consisting of inward-facing, recycled speaker boxes. The installation forms a protected cave within the exhibition room, a place where up to four visitors can gather around four microphones and a sound-effects device as if meeting around a campfire. What emerges from this togetherness is not, however, a narrative in the form of an oral history. Instead, the "stories" that can be told here emerge as collective and time-based audio sculptures, which expand the action radius of the igloo to the whole exhibition room and even, depending upon the particular group of "authors", to the entire exhibition. The archaic form of the igloo stands in stark contrast to the technical material of the speaker boxes, which form the minimalistic and very visible echo chamber for the many-layered and very ephemeral sound sculptures. 

(Text: Bettina Back)