Waterbirds: Migratory Sound Flow, 2022

Interested in language, sound and the afterlife of obsolete technologies, Candiani has created devices that translate images, shapes, and words into sounds and music by repurposing looms, keyboards, typewriters and other old mechanical devices to create wind, chord or percussion instruments. She sees these objects as interfaces between “the soul of the machine” and other types of sensibilities, including human and other animals’, and often references ancestral knowledges and stories. For the artist, these devices “lie somewhere between science fiction, Victorian steam technology and the latest artificial intelligence and word processing technologies”. 

Waterbirds: Migratory Sound Flow (2022), commissioned by the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, is a hanging “river” made with tree branches collected from a riverbank in Mexico. Its organic shape is loosely based on an aerial view of the Murray river basin in Australia. “This piece has as its starting point the migrations of aquatic birds. As a great blood system, the path of these birds connects hundreds of bodies of water in the Australian territory. I propose an installation that consists on a network of sound, light, wind and water. The system uses handmade reproductions of traditional pre-hispanic aerophones (clay ocarinas, shells, wooden flutes) and field recordings of water birds in Australia, to create a continuous and changing chant in the space of the Cutaway.”