Rapture is an artist’s project and a three-part publication, of which this is the second volume.Its baseline is the eponymous installation presented by Camille Norment in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, a site-specific and immersive work unfolding through a series of performances. The publications explore the dialoguebetween sound and the visual arts, past, present and future, to challenge the hegemony of vision in contemporary theory and art practice.
In this volume, Anne Hilde Neset, Greg Tate and Sami Khatib contribute essays reflecting on how sounds shape our environment, our bodies and our minds, haunting the memory like an earworm.Music expert and journalist Anne Hilde Neset analyzes disembodied voices and the meaning of sounds whose origins are unseen. Through the emblematic figure of Jimi Hendrix, writer, musician, producer and Columbia University’s visiting professor Greg Tate addresses the way in which music is ultimately measured by a performer’s ability to elicit the body in pain, the militarised body and the injured body. Philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at the American University of Beirut Sami Khatib writes about the ‘fugue’, a term belonging both to the realm of music and psychiatry, and its potential to denote a state of dissociation, a crisis of identity related to altered environments, affecting the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics upon which individuality hinges. The publication also includes a discussion between curators Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo with Norment, reflecting upon the notion of sound as a powerful mediator of cultural experience.
