Albanian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale

"I have left you the mountain" presents ten new texts written by contemporary writers and thinkers on the architecture of displacement. These texts have been set to music and sung by some of the last remaining groups of Albanian iso-polyphonic singers, an art form now protected as “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO.

Performances were captured as 8 channel recordings with separate channels for each voice. Using 8 speakers at the pavilion each of the voices is reproduced individually. Playback is controlled by a record player playing MsPinky vinyl records containing timecode information. A Max patch interprets this information in order to control playback of the 8 channel tracks.

Commissioner

The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Albania

Curators

Simon Battisti

Leah Whitman-Salkin

Åbäke

Sound design and programming

Peter Meanwell

Trond Lossius, BEK

Furniture design

Max Lamb

Pavilion construction

Luigi D'Oro & Arguzia S.r.l.

Photos by Špela Volčič.

cwmwl's icon

It was a really cool project and it was a pleasure to work for it - I was the one appointed for maintenance during the Biennale.
Cheers,
s

Year

2016-05

Location

Venice, Italy