The pair’s installations have been intriguing audiences for more than 20 years, including a video work in an empty coal bunker and, at the 2015 Venice Biennale, one in the ropemakers’ corridors of a shipyard. But the artists were particularly excited by the cathedral-like dimensions of the Wiltshire barn, thought to be the largest of its type in the UK and running to about a third of an acre of floor space.
Leber says: “It has opportunities to surround the audience in a detailed multi-channel sound environment.”
Leber and Chesworth describe themselves as cultural investigators, using video, sound, architecture and public participation to explore places undergoing social change, from the real spaces in which they exist to the realm of the imaginary.
Leber explains: “When we arrived in the UK in mid-2019, we had just emerged from another project following scientists digging in the red soils of Australia’s arid interior, battling flies and 38-degree heat. In Wiltshire we were drawn to contrasting environments with unique landforms and geologies: hillsides with lumpy anthills (emmet butts), chalk paths and ridges, flint piles, craggy stone forms of crumbling castles, dense forests, and the branches of a fallen 700-year-old tree.”
The exhibition features three performers with microphones and headphones acting as ‘field recordists’. Prompted by Leber and Chesworth to interrogate the Wiltshire landscape physically from non-typical perspectives, the actors sensed the world around them: “We were very keen to film these environments with an ‘acoustic consciousness’, letting sound be our rationale for guiding camera movement, as if the camera was detached from the eye.
