Un conejo en una tormenta de nieve
2019–2022
Sound instrument
Wooden structure, rabbit skins, silicone rubber, bronze reeds, sheepskin, DC motor.
300 × 100 × 244 cm
A Rabbit in a Snowstorm is a sound instrument/installation inspired by 19th-century German harmoniums. Through leather bellows, it draws in air which, as it passes through bronze reeds located on the side panels and the central module, sets them into vibration and produces sound. The harmonium is the only instrument that generates sound through the suction of air rather than through pressure, as is the case with other wind instruments. It is this particularity that interests me as a way of working with the idea of the void. It is as if the instrument were attempting to swallow its own voice, and in that gesture, it fills the space with sound. What gives body and existence here is not a breath, but a void—a void that resonates.
Rabbit skins and silicone rubber give the instrument its visual and material body. The rabbit skins lead me to think of absence not as an absolute, but as a trace. The animal is absent, yet some of its qualities remain: softness, color, texture, the warmth that lingers when you place it against your body. In tension with this organic absence, silicone rubber enters into dialogue with the mechanical dimension of the sound instrument. A cold material of recent invention, it embodies some of the most sought-after qualities of contemporaneity: flexibility, malleability, resistance to high temperatures, biocompatibility.