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.
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