ALBUM OUT NOW on Carrier Records!
BOUNDARYMIND is an evening-length electroacoustic sound piece and aggregating installation that explores and transgresses the geographical, cultural, psychological, and musical boundaries that impact how we share our past, present, and future selves with others.
Developed collaboratively over the course of eight years by Linda Jankowska and Katherine Young, the project also features video art by Kera Mackenzie and weavings by Molly Roth Scranton. Boundarymind’s production partners are Experimental Sound Studio, 6018 North, RomanSusan and P.O.Box Collective.
The complete work premiered on June 3rd, 2022 at 6018|North, with a repeat performance on June 5th. Two public performances included original, collaboratively composed music presented within a multimedia environment. Throughout the performance space we installed objects and materials - ceramic pots, plastic toys, wooden spoons, pine straw, sugar packets, and other things - chosen for their personal significance and power to evoke memories of places from our childhoods. For Linda, the space is a cottage in rural Poland where she spent formative years. For Katie, it is her early childhood home in Mississippi. On a series of visits in 2015, we gathered objects and sound recordings from these places.
The public was also invited to contribute objects and sounds to this project. We hosted community recording events at 6018 North, as well as at RomanSusan and P.O.Box Collective. We will incorporate the recordings we make of the objects people share into a second version of the installation, which we will present at ESS in 2023.
Working on this project, we have become acutely aware of how sharing the history and the personal significance of the objects we are performing with deepens our connection, allowing us to build the trust we need to make music together. Our collaborative process and boundarymind’s unique soundworld became charged with emotional significance and shared meaning. Thus, in this project the unexpectedly musical sounds of household objects allow us to investigate the formation of bonds forged by individuals from different backgrounds. Taking our collaborative musical relationship as a starting point, we will invite listeners and other makers to contribute to the work, sharing memories and sounds from their pasts, as well as their aspirations for our collective future.
*****
"It is as though we...believe that we should have rather than that we shall lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects for the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don't exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world….” - Rebecca Solnit
“Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory. It also refers to a certain foundation we have in our minds, to a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully. “ - Olga Tokarczuk
