Here, a nut falls twice

Here, a nut falls twice
27 November – 4 December 2022, ICA London
Sunday 27 November, 4pm
Absence here
A live sound performance by artists Lou Drago and Yen Chun Lin activating their installation Here, a nut falls twice. 
Saturday 3 December, 10pm
Drift (in) between
An overnight event exploring inaudible frequencies, sleepy rhythms, bedtime stories and the intensity of dreamlike raves. 

Artist-led research project Here, a nut falls twice presents a newly commissioned sculptural sound installation, performance and overnight event in the ICA Theatre.

Through light, darkness, music and sound, Here explores the idea of falling as it relates to sleep, love and physics. The project invites audiences to partake in collective listening – tuning into the ‘frequencies’ of falling and being held by its transient potential. Through the communality of this auditory and spacial experience, participants can empathically co-create a new, shared ‘here’.

Here is activated by an opening sound performance by Yen Chun Lin and Lou Drago on Sunday 27 November. From 10pm on Saturday 3 December until 6am on Sunday 4 December, audiences are invited to spend the night in the installation. Over eight hours, the event will include sound works featuring inaudible frequencies, sleep-inducing rhythms, dream echoes, lullabies of nightmares, shimmers of darkness, nocturnal wanders, and bedtime tales.

Here is initiated by Yen Chun Lin. The event programme features Yen Chun Lin, Marijn Degenaar, Lou Drago, Cee Füllemann, Tzu Ni Hung, Lithic Alliance, oxi peng, Felix Riemann ​a.k.a leslie, Berglind Thrastardottir and Matilda Tjäder, with lighting by Charlie Hope.

Part of the ICA 75th Anniversary Season

This project is in partnership with Rupert (Lithuania), where Lin was based for two months for research & development. 

Here, a nut falls twice aims to produce different forms of knowledge from the metabolic process of listening as an embodied collective practice. Stemming from Yen Chun Lin’s artistic research on sound, dust, ambient knowledge, animism, sensory threshold, consciousness field, and liminal spaces, Here, explores how empathy could be harnessed through alterations in sensual perception.

As a body of research, Here, primarily acts as a space holder for the meeting of different practices. It is not a project that looks for consensus or agreement amongst its contributors, but a container for meshing ideas, thinking with each other, and thinking with the vulnerable act of falling asleep. Through its different iterations Here, continuously reforms, responding to the contexts it appears in – like an organic body that responds to its changing environments.

Yen Chun Lin (s/he/they/it) currently lives and works among states of falling, falling asleep, falling awake, falling with(in) love, and falling (into) unknown. Through artistic practices, they tune into subtlety, liminality and the ‘seemingly imperceptible’ as a way of cultivating sensibility to communicate with(in) silence, darkness, dust, wind, and sub(un)conscious states.

Her works are materialised in the form of installations, hosting sculptural soundscapes, performances, collaborations, and speculative sciences. Yen received a Master in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University (London, 2019). S/he/they/it was the recipient of the Taipei Art Award grand prize (2021), and artist-in-residence at Rupert in Vilnius (2022). Recent exhibitions include Taipei Fine Art Museum (Taipei); Britta Rettberg Gallery (Munich); Centrum Project Space (Berlin); Catinca Tabacaru & Sandwich Gallery (Bucharest); Gossamer Fog (London), among others.

With support from the the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan

©2022 ICA Yen Chun Lin, Lou Drago