Migrations

(1995)

Migrations is an interactive sound installation consisting of a forty-foot wooden walkway containing sixty speakers mirrored by sixty more in wooden tracks attached to ceiling beams. The speakers above continually emit sounds of birds, wind, sea, cicadas, traffic and church bells recorded in and around Haamstede. The speakers in the walkway are triggered by a motion detector in the steps leading up to the piece, and emit the sound of my footsteps in the surrounding landscape mixed with a recitation of proverbs about birds in Dutch. Suspended over one end of the walkway, a pair of binoculars invite the viewer to sight onto a monitor high up on the adjacent ceiling. One by one, names of extinct birds are written onto a blackboard and then erased. The pecking sounds of the chalk, like the land-and-seascape sounds above, are continuous. Once a one-room schoolhouse in the 19th century, the Bewaerschole became a morgue during WW1 and beyond.