Sanctuary Lab

Sanctuary is a unique site-specific public art event that explores what happens when environment, art, technology, science and culture meet. Sanctuary creates an experimental space for new work ranging from performance and interactive installations to sound works, video projections and radio transmissions. Artists and audience come together for 24 hours to form a temporary community within the Galloway Dark Skies Park in Dumfries and Galloway. The combination of the landscape, the art and the people make this a unique event.

For Sanctuary Lab 2021, Eco Art commissioned a number of new artworks that connected people with environment.

Strange Loop was an immersive and meditative experience from theatre makers, Jamie Wardrop and Sita Pieraccini, a cosmic collage inspired by the sights and sounds of Sanctuary’s living biome. Welcome into a world within a world, co-created, with you!

Starting out at the Salon, participants set out on a walk and a listening exercise to create an alternative mapping of the landscape: a loop around the different ecologies of the site to gather natural materials – an opportunity to slow down and examine what is around us: seeds, grasses, flowers, whatever .. these discoveries were taken back and became the focus for later exploration.

Once returned to the Salon, AV and sound equipment was available for creation and play. Through the use of live stream digital microscopes and the improvisatory techniques of the sound artist and VJ, participants joined in collaborative communion with the local environment. Under the lens of the microscopes experiments took place revealing the hidden worlds of the samples and live compositions were crafted.

By dusk participants were ready for the DIY jam and performance, retracing the journey they made earlier in the day. The small and delicate finds became projected large in a stream of unfolding imagery with sound and vocal improvisation from Sita.

filigree traces by audiovisual composer Louise Harris was a site-specific, participative walking-in-sound work designed to encourage visitors to engage with the shapes, forms, patterns and experience of their environment and how they might think through and explore these in sound and body.

Distributed around the park, in fixed and contrasting locations that require exploring different environments, were a series of music boxes that visitors found by chance or used a map to locate.

Visitors were given a roll of music box paper and a hole punch to use to document their journey through the park in whatever way they wish; they then played these at each of the music boxes they find. The intention – through both the action of participants and the fixed music box stations – was to create soft, slender traces and fragments of sound and music that permeate the park, catching the ear of visitors as they moved through their surroundings and shaping their audiovisual experience of the environment.

‘Deliberately inconclusive investigations into SOUNDS & SHADES of 3 cubic meters of Galloway Forest’ is the latest manifestation of sound artist Helmut Lemke’s curiosity into those encounters that have no lasting residue but our memory – encounters that happen in time without leaving a material body behind.

In the durational performances he zoomed into randomly chosen but clearly defined areas to record and share observations utilising automatic writing, drawing, amplification, notations and conversations in performative inquiries.