Audemars Piguet and The Art of Listening: Under Water

For the past few years, Audemars Piguet has worked with a variety of artists to create large-scale installations to start a conversation about global environmental issues. This year, they debut a new project by Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen. The Art of Listening: Under Water, a new public site-specific sound composition, will be presented during Art Basel in Miami Beach at the Rotunda in Collins Park.

The installation provides visitors with a unique opportunity to listen closely to the ocean’s inhabitants and to reflect upon the ways in which human activity interferes with underwater life. This work is part of the latest chapter in the artist’s ongoing research into the environmental impact of human-created sounds on our planet.

The Art of Listening: Under Water uses the platform of Art Basel in Miami Beach to bring awareness to the ocean’s increasingly fragile ecosystem and to how environmental concerns are localized within this seaside community. Winderen uses sounds recorded in the Miami harbor area, the Barents Sea and the Tropical Oceans to expose the constant underwater presence of human-created sound today. Made with long-time collaborator Tony Myatt, Winderen’s work collages local sounds in an immersive 22 audio-channel installation within the minimalist setting of the Collins Park Rotunda.

Winderen graduated from the Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths, University of London and has a background in mathematics, chemistry and fish ecology from the University of Oslo. Since 1992, sound has been at the core of her artistic practice, leading her to travel across Europe, Asia and the Americas to record audio environments and ecosystems hard for humans to access physically and aurally.

For the last 14 years, Winderen has used high-precision and high-quality hydrophones, microphones and ultrasound detectors to record sound from different animals, as well as inaudible sounds such as ultrasounds lying above the range of human hearing, gathered in oceans, rivers, lakes or in other environments inaccessible to the human ear.

Since the beginning of her career, Winderen has carefully listened to how fish, crustaceans and mammals use sound to communicate orient and meet across the oceans of the world. As sound travels almost five times faster underwater than in air, water is an excellent medium for sound communication. Winderen’s compositions capture complex biodiversity, often pointing to the pressing environmental issues we may be less aware of because we cannot see them directly.

As Winderen explains, her work is a careful reflection on the environment. “When I make recordings in the environment, I record the whole ecosystem with the animals in it. When I am installing the sound piece, I work with the space as it is and not against it.”

Audemars Piguet invited Winderen to visit the Vallée de Joux in early 2019 for a two-part brief residency which resulted in the creation of Winderen’s first site-specific commission for Audemars Piguet, Du Petit Risoud aux profondeurs du Lac de Joux, which visitors in Miami Beach can experience with headsets in the Manufacture’s Lounge at the show. This work, first unveiled during Art Basel in Basel 2019 immerses visitors acoustically in the Vallée de Joux’s unique ecosystem by combining inescapable sound of civilization travelling through the forest and land into the water of the Lac de Joux.

Additionally, the Manufacture’s Lounge created by Brooklyn-based, contemporary artist Fernando Mastrangelo and first unveiled at Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019 will continue its evolution in Miami Beach.

Known for his evocative sculptural designs which comprise everyday materials such as salt, sand and cement, Mastrangelo has designed a lounge which invites visitors to experience the Vallée de Joux. He acomplishes this through seamless gradients of tones and textures, with walls, display cases and furniture made of crushed boulders from the Swiss Jura Mountains. Elements from the new collection, Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet, are highlighted throughout.

From the Vallée de Joux to Miami Beach, Winderen’s works encourage visitors to consider their engagement with the environment and its creatures, locally and globally. In this respect, The Art of Listening: Under Water and Winderen’s research parallels the work of the Audemars Piguet Foundation, which has been contributing to worldwide forest conservation through environmental protection and youth awareness-raising programmes since 1992.