Premiered at Dystopia Sound Art Biennial 2024 in Berlin, Germany, Spill is an installation of instrumental sculptures created site-specifically for HAUNT/frontviews, the main venue of the Biennial. It is the third collaboration between Heyse Ip and regiment.

A spillage of form, light, and sound takes root in the shower room: while pipe systems often exist unseen in our urban environment, here they leak out, forcing the viewer to see, hear and experience them. A staging that exceeds its bounds, Spill hints at the impossibility of control and confinement, opening up to tuning in to the innate resonances and frequencies of pipes through their materiality and sonic potential.

As the philosopher Jane Bennett puts it, to “the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other,” the installation represents a momentary intersection between the artists and the site, blurring the line between the roles of performer and instrument. Heyse Ip and regiment are interested in what constitutes a performance, how to make a place ready for things to happen between the audience and the elements of the work. Here the performance is only temporary, while the soundscape and the instruments act in a recurring loop, making the spill permanent.

The artists draw from soundscape creation within filmic practices to create a space for another world to emerge, where a range of otherworldly narratives can be imagined and coexist. It is a desire, as Bennett proposes, to “give voice to a thing-power.”

The artists performed a unique live version of Spill, for the opening of the Biennial.

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