THE WEIGHT OF INDIVIDUAL STRIKES TELLS OF A GREATER FORGE (2021) is an audio and performance artwork that leverages the sounds of daily work as learning devices for community resonance amidst multilayered discordance. Framed around the legend of Pythagoras listening to the strikes of blacksmith hammers to lay foundations for Western musical tuning, THE WEIGHT OF INDIVIDUAL STRIKES TELLS OF A GREATER FORGE uses the sounds of metal and wood workshops to reimagine foundations for community tuning. Led by the artist duo Bertille Laguet (CH) and Sherwin Rio (US), the work uses recorded sounds of the pair’s respective work sites — Laguet’s forge in Chexbres and both Rio’s carpentry shop in Williamsburg and fabrication studio in San Francisco— as an instructive tool for interpretation by additional co-collaborators from a combined extended network across various disciplines: Charlene Tan, Jeanne Tara, Maria Ferrer, and Owen Takabayashi. This process of creation and interpretation started as a pair and trickled into a group is further meant to be poetic and generative learning devices again a Western capitalist mindset of individuality, competition, and separation that fuels xenophobia, self-interest, and colonizing interests.
As part of artist-curatorial collective Fragmentin’s first major curatorial project Binominale, THE WEIGHT OF INDIVIDUAL STRIKES TELLS OF A GREATER FORGE was simultaneously exhibited at La Becque and Bass & Reiner. The audio performance was reverberated through the glass of a large window in each exhibiting venue, chosen to draw the viewer closer inside/outside to pursue the emanating sounds. The sounds of a blacksmith forge and carpentry shop becomes a meditative method of making sense of, understanding, and tuning into our community/communities.
Additional graphic scores produced by the artists’ work sites are available for the invited public at large to interpret and create as their own metaphors for production of knowledge systems.