The musical composition for this piece was inspired by the title of Mery Godigna Collet’s visual installation “With Head in The Clouds and Feet on the Ground” transcribed in Morse Code through dots and bars arranged on the wall in the gallery space. Imagining the viewer’s pace walking along the entire length of the installation, while deciphering the phrase in Morse code, the composition’s simple melody seeks to insinuate, in slow motion, the rhythm and length of each word in the title. The added effect of the melody’s repetition, and its subtle decrease in volume as the viewer advances in space, is conceived to evoke the notion of distance, both real and imagined, remitting to 92 distant locations in the world, from which the images of the sky (which we see contained in dots) actually originated.
Surpik Angelini
August 2021
Head on the Clouds | Feet on the Ground (2021|22)
Series “Head in the clouds| Feet on the ground”
Tin boxes, aluminum, corn seeds. Linen fabric
“Still life”, the word “Death” is present in the Spanish translation (Naturaleza Muerta), the temporality of life and the unfinishedness of it are present. The piece talks about nature and the degradation of it. Culture and the attempts to cancel or change it by colonialism.
The seeds become encapsulated energy responsible for our familiar context. Are the origin of what define our culture: flavors, smells, colors… that then translates into weaving, music, cuisine… our feet on the ground.
The selection of corn seeds is a paradox and responds to concepts as belonging, migration, colonization, and decolonization.
“I come from the Cultura del Maiz (Corn Culture). Corn is the most produced crop in the world in these days. It has migrated all over the world. It is a very adaptable plant. A survivor”.
The artists contacted 92 people in different locations in the world and asked them to simultaneously photograph the sky on a given day and time and then send the digital images to her.
She transformed the collection of sky images into a code phrase by using Morse Code.
“Presenting the fragments of skies inside last century tin boxes (as if peering through a window) and converting them into an obsolete language turning them into a code as secret and as confusing as the codes required to communicate these days or as difficult to crack as the Covid 19 code”
“This work was born in silence during times of a pandemic and increasing isolation. We are all under the same sky”
This work includes a musical composition by Surpik Angelini in which the composition’s simple melody seeks to insinuate, in slow motion, the rhythm and length of each word of the morse code. The added effect of the repetition and the subtle change in volume as the viewer advances, is conceived to evoke the notion of distance and remitting to 92 distant locations in the world.
