Is a petrol station a concrete island or a place of social encounters?

audio-installation / mixed materials / site-specific

Every journey has a beginning. This beginning found itself within an urge to find something that could not be produced, or consumed at the time of the pandemic situation. It was the seeking of a social freedom — an analogue version of an encounter within daily occurrences. Embarking on this multifaceted journey, the concrete island of the petrol station, a ship floating at the margin of our social consciousness, could be discovered and experienced. A moving island, offering illusion, compensation, and transformation through closing and opening. The place rendered itself as an indispensable cultural asset, a cultural centre and heritage on a small scale.

This audio-installation will literally talk for itself. After a performative activation, the space in its visible shape can be experienced. Through this the possibility of encountering an abstract invisible space will be opened up to the audience for the finite duration of thirty minutes. It is a social space, reaching beyond the commonly perceived structures of walls and concrete. This audio diary, with a clear beginning and ending, is the final conclusion of a rich and colourful journey. Resulting from this process a collection of diary texts arose, becoming the main trace of the witnessed, namely a series of observant performative acts (passive observations), following a defined set of rules and patterns, and two performances (active happenings). This depicts an unusual perception, showing heterotopian values of a known space with a clear purpose to serve, a place not to linger — a place to consume and to move on. But in order to create an overall equilibrium in a sociocultural context, a counterpoised subgroup, a patchwork family nevertheless, signifies the dominant but also hidden community here. The spoken word, delivered, decoded and translated through the voice, is based on the canonical song form. This altered musical method carries the idea of being amidst a room of people, listening to the surrounding conversations, recited through the partly incomprehensible medley of voices. As a medium the magnetic tape, played live through a number of nine cassette recorders, is used. These choices match the atmosphere and include a time reference relating to the building of the petrol station itself. The magnetic tape offers the same transformative qualities in relation to the space through the ephemeral, non-durable lifespan and the marked duration due to usage and consumption of the audio. Also, the direct environment influences the delivered nature of the audio itself. The abstract shape of the audio diary becomes the spoken chant of the petrol station, meeting the noise and recounting the observed.