ELSA MENCAGLI ANDERSEN

(listening to a breath)

Threads, ceramic, metal, 2024

Photography: Fabrizio Farrone

Ascolto di un respiro is a series of sculptural installations exploring the relationship between breathing and speech. Breathing is the movement that enables the production of sound/voice and thus speech. The works emerge in the threshold between breath and sound, attempting to capture that moment through the poetic language of form.

threads, ceramic, metal, 2024

Photography: Fabrizio Farrone

(The flowers of this field speak another language)

HD video, 02:00 min, 2023

Directed and performed by Elsa Mencagli Andersen

Camera Aurora Pica

In the countryside where I grew up, I lay on the ground and listened. The field welcomed my body and whispered the stories of my family. 

In the video, I weave spoken words and images into a landscape of memories and flowers, soil, dancing bodies, birds, insects, and leaves. 

Parlano un’altra lingua i fiori di questo campo is part of a long-term artistic research investigating the relationship between humans and the land in an agricultural context. In my research, I am interested in practices of listening and knowing that open for intimate and personal relationships with the place. Reminding us that the land is not merely a reservoir of resources for humans to exploit but rather the earth we belong to, both materially and spiritually, and we share with other living beings.

Thanks to all the participants of Ascolti di Terra, Ker Aps, and Cooperativa Teveriva Bio.

- MORNING CONVERSATIONS

threads, ceramic, metal,2022

Photography Laure Winants

”Intonations, Act I is a serie of three sculptural installations exploring the relation between speech and sound.  The ceramic pieces are “sequences of sound” and “scores of sentences”. Hanging on tangled threads, they represent voices weaving in and out of conversations, with moments of overlap and moments of estrangement. Designed to be read from left to right, the knots fluctuate in their density, just as voices oscillate in their intensity. The gaps between the knots, where the waxed cotton threads hang, symbolise non-verbal communication: gestures, silences, glances, breaths. ” - Monica Lindsay Perez.

drawings, 2022

Listening to French conversations and tracing the intonation of speech.

Bedsheet, hair, threads, and audio, 2022

Sound in collaboration with Pacôme Genty

Photography Laure Winants

At Dawn is the intimacy of morning conversations, of lingering between dreams and being awake. The light is gentle and the voice is soft, still searching for the words. The bedsheet containing fragmentary phrases stitched with my own hair and threads. The accompanying sound installation, is a voice moving between sounds, fragments of sentences and words - inviting the listener to fall in and out of the meaning of sounds.

Ink on paper, 2022

- SONG OF MOURNING

threads and seeds, 2022

Photography Fabrizio Farroni

In the summer of 2020, I collected seeds along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. I carried the seeds between Portugal and Italy for two years until they took form.

The sun there is going down, dear is an artwork that emerges from an interior landscape, in a creative process that follows intuition. It is a song to pause and breathe into the pain of a loss.

The sun there is going down, dear is an artwork that emerges from an interior landscape, in an creative process that follows intuition.

It is a song to pause and breathe into the pain of a loss.

note: the title of the artwork ”The sun there is going down, dear” // Djîgô’es gu qagû’lAga kuda’l, comes from a traditional mourning song of the Haida.

01:26 min on loop, HD video, 2022

Copper Leg Art Residency, Vaskjala, Estonia

In bringing the act of writing into the landscape, I've started to think about the relation of the human with the land through that lens. In how when reading the land, the land writes itself into my being. Further reflecting on how humans and the land are interwoven in a fabric in constant becoming.

stones, threads, metal, 2021

Photography Fabrizio Farroni

Intervalli is a series of sculptural installations exploring what remains of verbal language when it is translated into another materiality. When it becomes rhythm and form, matter and void, a silent composition, a trace of words.

(The articulation of words is a dance of the organs)
HD video, 01.05 min. on loop, 2021,

The work explores the articulatory gestures of vocalizing verbal language. Drawing from phonetics and speech therapy sessions, the work lingers in a space before words - in the production of sounds as a choreography of body movements, a dance of muscles and organs. Through the lens of the camera, it brings the attention to the micro/macro movements of the body that are activated in uttering a sound. The close-up view and the discrepancy between sound and image, lead to a sense of estrangement and invite for a shift in perspective in an ordinary event.

Photography: Fabrizio Farroni

Performance, 2019, Reykjavik

Creator and performer Elsa Mencagli Andersen

Photography Maciej Zakrzewski FotoTeatr

Five people at the time are invited into the space for the length of approximately 30 minutes. They are told that once they are inside they can move, stand, sit, or lay on the floor, that when the door opens again, they will leave at their own time. They are given a paper with the events of the performance; those that have already happened and those that are yet to come.

In the white cube the audience encounter the humid ”body“ of seaweed, that has been sown together on that very day in the same place. The sown seaweed is hanging from a metal bar and reaches the level of the head. The audience is given the time to interact with the seaweed in their own way. They can place themselves wherever in the space and tune into the olfactory dimensions of the work, as the voice of the performer reading a text, impregnates the space. The text that is read does not serve an informational purpose, but creates yet another layer in the space - another material that resonates with the whole, as a sensorial and breathing element to experience.

HD video, 11:31 min, 2020

creator Elsa Mencagli

performer Gaia Mencagli

It was low tide at the beach of Dry Lagoon State Park, Northern California, June 2018. On the shore we found empty shells of crabs and learned about molting, the process crabs undergo in order to grow. That same day we covered our bodies in mud.

Exploring the physicality of the biological process of molting, the work proposes an encounter to other-than-human realities, and invites the audience to tune into cyclical processes of renewal and transformation.

HD video, 11:20 min, 2019

creator and performer Elsa Mencagli Andersen

camera Loren Kronemyer

The touch of blue is a gentle duet between a woman and a machine; a meeting point between two very different agents in which both shed a new and different light on the other. Through a choreography of touch, the work proposes a different way to engage with ordinary objects.

”The work stirs up questions around the physicality of touch. The touch of blue is highly empathetic and sensorial in the ways it invites its audience to experience imaginary touch. How far can touch be elongated - and still feel very real and physical? What, if we think of objects/technology beyond their utility and function? How can we re-imagine tenderness and sensuality? Are these qualities that reside in the animal/human? Or do they only grow in relation to another entity?” - N. Tormann.

Performance at GlogauAir, Berlin, 2017

saxophon Anja Nedremo

violin Anna Jalving

flute Marie Sønderskov

Drops, sounds. Ice melting. Drops hitting the paper bowls, creating a rhythm that soon is disrupted. A new one occurs. Then, other sounds. The musicians listen to the drops and respond with their instrument, finding a new language. In the now, in continuous change. The exploration of sounds and rhythms unfolds as the light moves through the ice and the solid matter transforms in time into a liquid state.

Conversations into a liquid state invites the audience to move into a landscape of subtle sounds, ice melting, bodies, and light.

04:54 min, HD video, 2017

silver metal streamers, 2018

Skin#2 was created to take part to List í ljósi Festival. The new landscape shared with the pre-vious one the light of the north, the snow, and the cold wind. Nevertheless the piece was adapted to meet the new site and context.

The work responds and reveales the fleeting elements of its surroundings, through subtle movements and sounds, in a wild dance in the strong wind, in the refractions of light constantly altering the surface, in the reflections of human bodies, moving around.

silver metal streamers, 2017

Through the Skin, I discover the landscape.

The woven piece emerges from the translation of local traditional motifs, into a material responding to the white light and the glittering ice in the snow.

Through subtle movements and sounds, the piece is revealing the fleeting element of air, while the refractions of light, are constantly altering its surface. 

performance, 2017

A meteorological report is a collection of writings, emerging from the encounter with the the winter landscape of Valdres, Norway. The white light, the glittering ice in the snow, the frozen air.

The observations of the meteorological conditions are based on the sensory experience of the body.

The reading invites the audience into a space of white, of subtle sounds. Where the frozen snow is cracking when you walk at night, and the stars are sharp dots in the sky.

Installation, 2016

photography by Zelé Angelides

thanks to Arts, Letters and Numbers

Water running through the pipes. Cracks. Leaks, and water dripping. Water moving through the pipes, listen, drops. Rusted pipes against the white ceiling, rusted copper and steel, white walls. Rust, green, mold, and traces of cuts, of joints, of fluid silver now solid. 

Echo of drops in the room. 

The pipes were hidden in the walls of the house, were removed because defect, were stored in the basement. Now a visible structure in the room, with the room; a space that invites to listen, to look, to move.

HD video 1:37 min. on loop, 2016

thanks to Arts, Letters and Number