Sound Heeling (2025)
3 Sound installations created for the Group Exhibition "Material Intelligence: Action Research" presented at Benyamini Center Gallery, Tel-Aviv Jaffa, Curated by Shira Shoval and Yair Barak. Photos by Shai Ben Efraim.
The works are a collaboration with artisans and craftsmen working at Kiryat Hamelacha - an urban conservation area in southern Tel Aviv-Jaffa. All three installations were accompanied with musical pieces I composed and were performed live by Meitar Ensemble throughout the exhibition.
I frequently visited the factories, and collaborated with the local makers to create the pieces. The first piece is "Sound Heeling", made with Avi Yaffe, an orthopedic shoe maker.This is a plaster casting of his foot. I recorded talks with him, and the way he works in the factory.I then created a musical track accompanying the talks, and embedded it in the casting.I built a system with ESP-32, battery, charging module, a switch, DAC, SD card and a speaker that is inside the the foot, to create a portable, rechargable WAV media player, which plays the file stored in the SD in a loop.
The second piece I created for the exhibition is the piece "At Elad's" - sounds from a casting factory creating Judaica, pins, and necklaces from semi metal materials, creating a rich soundscape which I embedded in a bucket and trommel stones - that are used to sand the objects, and are one of the most iconic pieces of equipment in this factory.
The last piece is called "Swift's Nest" - and was created after recording a flock of Swifts on Saturday when no people are working around the factories, and they get to fly freely around. I created a "pseudo nest", created by materials I found in the factories, and some left-over electronics from my proccess.
Some Work In Progress photos - by Yair Meyuhas.
