Rapturous Bodies: A Conversation with Camille Norment

Sound, like experience, is fleeting, but it leaves traces in the mind and in the body. As such it is historical, and a viable tool for anticipating and understanding what is to come.

—Camille Norment

Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo:

Before we discuss your project Rapture for the Nordic Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, it would be good to talk more generally about the ideas and themes in your work, with reference to previous projects. We could start by talking about sound and music, which underlie much of your practice as an artist. Within which context, historical or counterhistorical, do you situate this interest?

Camille Norment:

Heidegger suggested an understanding of the world through sound and hearing because of sound's temporal and nonessentializing qualities. If we take this thought further and pause to listen to history as an onset of temporalities, we could also hear the emergence of human history as a wave of recognizable and dynamic characteristics, ranging from intimate sexualities to social conflicts, some of which repeat and converge with echoing force. It's less a specific kind of music or history of music that I'm interested in than how sound and

Camille Norment, from a performance with the Camille Norment Trio on the opening day of Rapture in the Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale, May 6, 2015. Courtesy OCA. Photo: Marta Buso

music are situated in culture and society. There is no sound that falls outside of culture or social experience, so I find it a revealing entry into sociological experience. Often I'm attracted to instances that seem to denote or are associated with spaces of cultural or social dissonance. And I refer to "dissonance" not as a construction of opposites, but rather as an active state—a new element created from the space that's in between, centralizing all sound into a synonymous noise of acoustic experience and social signification. Central to many of these investigations is the hold that music has over the body, which has caused many sounds and musical experiences to undergo censorship—especially in relation to the female body.

Close-up of Camille Norment playing the glass armonica. Nordic Pavilion, 2015. Courtesy OCA. Photo: Marta Buso

KGA:

That "hold" that you talk about has of course been a key question in scientific and sociocultural debates over the centuries. Succumbing to feelings within one's body has at times been revered while at other times feared and considered to lead to a loss of rationality. Your work's focus on the perceptual isn't a matter of losing one's mind but of coming to one's senses. I believe the issue here is one of emplacement, and your practice suggests the sensuous interrelation between body-mind-environment. In this way, you challenge modernity's hierarchical ranking of the senses. Modernity privileges the eye, the gaze, as the leading sense, organizer, and interpreter of the world. Bringing the notion of emplacement to bear on your work pushes the spectator to consider his or her sensuous relationship to the materiality of the world in which we live.¹

CN:

My interest was never to replace a hierarchical focus on the visual with a hierarchical focus on the sonic, for example, but rather to engage in the complex relations of a broader sensory experience. Of course, this initially meant raising a general discourse around the sonic, but this discourse was also justified and made more specific by my interest in the unique role that sound has in relation to human psychology.

I started to address this question early on in my practice. In Dead Room (2000), for example, the exterior of the space is covered with sound-insulation material, while the interior is padded with bright white vinyl. Eight subwoofers embedded symmetrically in the four walls pulse with the rhythm of an inaudible bass frequency that causes the speaker membranes to visibly move in and out without producing audible sound through the...