With JOLT, A long distance lullaby Vibeke Mascini develops a new installation that deepens her ongoing interest into the electric alchemy of distress. For the duration of her exhibition at P/////AKT, she receives the discharge signal of an electric eel residing in the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, USA, and composes a response in an attempt to offer compassion and comfort in real time.
Involving writing, sound and a series of altered night lights coming from the electric sockets of the exhibition space, Mascini will pay attention to signals of suffering on a global scale while making an attempt to reach out through the ways of the lullaby in a way that is caring at times and desperate at others.
Using fluid media including video, installation, sound and text, Vibeke Mascini explores the sensorial scaling of abstract phenomena, with the intention to seek agency from intimacy. In long-term collaboration with scientists, engineers, government employees, and musicians she proposes the development of a conscious understanding of electric energy as a statement of interconnectedness and entanglement – between species, media and nature, matter and energy.
By exploring the complex relationship between source and user, and focusing on the material implications of unlikely sources from which electricity is derived, Mascini proposes installations where memories and mysterious sensorial experiences meet the newest technology of the rapidly growing field of energy storage systems.
Her unlikely sources of electricity include a whale carcass, a melting glacier, confiscated cocaine, and human remains, which she then shapes around associations with these electric agents, and their implication and tension of their destruction in the process of becoming fuel.
Documentation photographs by Chun-Han Chiang
