Vibeke Mascini

Specifically produced for the exhibition at Capc, 'Prelude' takes the form of approximately twenty flowers illuminated by night lights plugged directly into the building’s infrastructure. Night lights are a recurring motif in Mascini's practice, offering calm and serenity to better face the night. This concept of an empathetic transitional state between day and night, and more metaphorically between life and death, is central to Mascini’s work. It is reinforced here by the living element of the flowers, which, throughout the exhibition, will mature, wither, and subsequently be replaced by fresh flowers. This installa­tion introduces the core research of Mascini’s practice: making tangible the electricity that invisibly shapes our reality and poetically exploring the thoughtful interrelationships between the living world and our technological infrastructures.

Vibeke Mascini draws inspiration from the bizarre yet true story of an eel named Miguel Wattson, who became an internet sensation a few years ago. The team at the Tennessee Aquarium created a social media account on X (formerly Twitter) in the eel’s name to spark public interest in this unusual creature. Each time the eel emitted a strong electric discharge—a response to stress or self­defence—a tweet was generated in the form of an onomatopoeic exclamation. Fascinated and moved by this interspecies dialogue, Mascini created this immersive installation as a lullaby, in an attempt to soothe and express compassion for the animal, by sending reply messages in real time. A collection of small LED screens fills the space, each displaying a fragment of text limited to 40 characters. Together, they form a continuous sequence of words written by the artist in response to the signals emitted by the eel’s electrical discharges. Through this piece, the artist questions how we respond to various global distress signals — whether in terms of empathy, support, action, or commitment. For this project Mascini drew from Susan Sontag’s notion of “tele­intimacy”, which points to the complex and sometimes numbing awareness of conflict and suffering that happen in other parts of world, but that reaches us with minimal delay through our advanced technological devices.

Tangere (Latin for “touch” or “perceptible by touch”) considers human relations and knowledge sharing through the lens of energy exchange and physical touch. Binding together two seemingly distant musical traditions, lullaby and reggaeton, the self initiated genre of the “lullaeton” delves into the deep corporeal relation to rocking or cradling of the body as a way of soothing and comforting. Protagonists in earlier chapters of the lullaeton project include her child-hood history teacher and her grandmother - represented solely by their hands performing curated manual gestures. Tangere explores the character of the lover, whose touch Mascini considers as an exchange of tender knowledge and informed intuition. In this work, two hands can be seen in nearly each video frame: at times this involves two hands, one of each belonging to the different bodies of two lovers, while at other moments the two hands are duplicates - created by the reflection of one hand moving in front of a mirror as if by muscle memory. Since their nails are adorned with miniature spirit levels, these hands move in constant relation to equilibrium, teasingly feeling their way in and out of balance. This way, Mascini imagines the spirit level as a paradoxical tool: a rational instrument, yet with a fluid nature. Commonly used as a tool to confirm the straightness of objects, Mascini defies this function by placing the tool in relation to the curved body that moves inside a classical and crooked hotel room, pointing to a profound relation between the environment, the human body and technical application, and how one is able to leak into the other.

Departing from the understanding of electricity sockets as portals, Jolt acknowledges the open ended systems of energy transference. In a combination of standardized electronic parts layed bare, Jolt conveys a vehicle through which electric current and memory run simultaneously, connecting processes marked by destruction and metamorphoses with our everyday electric activities.

The biggest battery on earth is an artificial lake. In the summer of 2022, Mascini travelled to a power station in the Swiss Alps, which commonly generates electricity from the meltwater of nearby glaciers. Divided by a large dam, the waters are transformed into currents of voltage. Commemorating this finite landscape, she filled a large jug with glacier water from the power station site. Throughout the exhibition at Rijksakademie Amsterdam in June 2023, this bottled glacier water gradually poured out through the eyes of an electric power socket, as if weeping.

Departing from a ‘waste liquor’ called ‘leachate’ (lixiviado) - a term used to describe any liquid that extracts soluble components as it passes through matter - Vibeke imagines the hardly traceable, nevertheless profoundly present memories that seep into electric currents. ‘El Basurero’, the biggest waste site in Zone 3 of Guatemala City, may at first glance appear to be the final resting place for many discarded items, but is in fact a place of livelihood and generation for numerous people (and other beings) who daily sift the waste piles in the hope to find useful substances. Recently a more technologically sophisticated practice of generation has been implemented on the waste site: that of methane processing into electricity. For Lixiviado this energy was harnessed to make a micro grid within the gallery space of Proyectos Ultravioleta. Stored within used car batteries (those of the emblematic yellow waste trucks which can be seen moving throughout the city of Guatemala) this ‘waste energy’ powers the exhibition’s light throughout the duration of the show. Simultaneously, a series of new batteries that were offered in exchange, power the waste trucks as they drive to and from the Basurero for the years to come.

Increasingly, frost is known to arrive without warning. In a recent severe Dutch winter, birds that were in the midst of their hunting flight have been found to be frozen into lake-ice, capturing an instance of flight. Hemidemisemiquaver is the term for the shortest note within musical notation, in the case of this project the title refers to the briefest of moments that is postponed within time. Freezing the instance in which a bird appears to be mid-flight, inside a mixture of meltwater and resin.

Bodies are time capsules – storing memory from distant times and places. Recalling the boundless memory of her high school history teacher, Mascini reconnected with him to ask if, twenty years after his retirement, he was still able to draw a map of Europe by heart as he used to do, marking the contours of even the smallest peninsula.

“Blind Men is a video and sound composition that provides an intimate glimpse into a sterile necropsy room—an inquest room for scientific research—in which a beached whale is presented for pathological examination. Filmed close to the skin, the blurred camera image shows small fragments of the whale’s body. The only way in which the viewer can see a total picture is by imaginatively puzzling the fragments together. With this, Blind Men evokes the parable from the story ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’, in which the limits of human perception are demonstrated and the imagination is actively addressed. Blind Men’s fragmented impressions encourage attentive and careful observation. Sound plays an essential role in obtaining a parallel experience of the environment, dominated by rustling cold rooms, humming extractor hoods and latex gloves. By means of a spatial, multi-channel sound installation, the exhibition space is approached acoustically in a way that is more similar to the way a blind person or a whale experiences it: by sensing it based on hearing. Blind Men plays with a high degree of abstraction that makes it challenging to distinguish body and environment from each other. In this way, Mascini wants to address the porosity and connection between bodies and environments and establish the profound, reciprocal relationship between the two. For Mascini, this has been a central factor in approaching the subject, experiencing the whale’s body as an alienating archive in which traces of human society are stored, accumulated over the centuries. Apart from the history of processing whale bodies into various products and applications used in human society, there is also a long history of humans entering whale bodies. The story of Jonah and the Whale is perhaps the most famous example, but recent scientific studies have also found traces of human industries accumulating in the tissue of whales, making whales some of the most polluted animals in the world. This kind of anthropogenic traces of contamination are central to the current pathological research that takes place at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University, where Blind Men is recorded. The body as a toxic archive, in which an apparently external world has a major internal influence. A world in which a single element can expose a whole chain of (eco)systems and industries, as evidence of a deep and sometimes disturbing entanglement between existences.”

The first cremation in the Netherlands took place at Westerveld in the spring of 1914, after which the ashes of the deceased were scattered ceremonially in the flowering field around the crematorium. The heat produced from the cremation was sent into the sky, unnoticed. Nowadays most funerals in this country are followed by a cremation, with the remaining ashes serving as the substance of commemoration–ashes which have met such heat that not even the traces of DNA linger. While the ashes become an object of remembrance, the surplus heat that remains after the cremation is mostly left outside of consideration. Ray consists of a single projected beam of light, which slowly searches the space, much like a lighthouse. The battery that generates that light is partly charged with electricity from excess heat that is produced at a crematorium. Developed with consent from living relatives, this reservation and redirection of energy serves as a collective memorial in which commemoration, mourning, and renewal are central.  The project is part of an ongoing research and series of collaborations on energy transference and investigations into how the vitality of matter in decay, remission, or after death can be turned into a power source. Ray proposes ways to experience the heat produced by the process of cremation consciously, to acknowledge the non-linearity of bereavement and loss, and to offer alternate means by which to grieve and remember.   Created especially for the space of St. Catherine’s Cathedral, the artwork is in keeping with its architecture: it encourages quiet contemplation. Ray subtly draws attention to the resonances of death and the challenges of contemporary time-based mourning practices.

From a collection of long ago taxidermied moths and butterflies - which were all locally found - the dust and other fragments from the decayed animals were gathered. This material was then used within a self-developed electrostatic drawing method; sealed between airplane windows.

A stranded whale has always been an omen, informing us of the vitality of the oceans. Such event is deeply embedded in human society since part of the electricity reaching our cities is generated from whale remains. Our electric grid however, does not allow tracing the direct source of the electricity we use. After a stranded whale got rendered into electricity, a battery was charged directly at the power plant. In the sound installation Salvage this ‘whale battery’ drives a pianola (player piano), slowly discharging with every performance. As the battery is activated, the keys of the pianola automatically start to move. It plays a composition based on scientific recordings of whale communication. These whale sounds are faithfully translated to the tones played by the pianola. Over the last ten years teams of scientists around the world have studied the communication of humpback whales to measure the impact of the increasing ocean noise caused by commercial shipping and seismic sonar blasts. Results have shown that many whales communicate less, becoming more solitary, while simultaneously their tone frequency drops lower over time. Many thanks goes out to the generous advise and help of: Thomas van Dijk (E-Stone Batteries), Pepijn Kamminga (Naturalis Biodiversity Center Leiden), Nick Pyenson (Smithsonian Institution), Rendac, EV Europe, Kasper Janse en Yvo Verschoor (Pianola Museum Amsterdam), Paul Rosero Contreras, Mondriaan Fund, Creative Industries Fund and Stroom.