Natasha Anderson

Meet the Residents / Siena is a seasonal series of interviews with Amant’s Siena Studio & Research residents. The conversations take place in the Amant residency studios in Chiusure, in the heart of the province of Siena.

In the summer of 2024, Amant’s Chief Curator, Tobi Maier recorded this conversation during a studio visit with resident artist Natasha Anderson. With this transcript of their conversation, we introduce Anderson’s practice to our wider audience and discuss questions such as: What is the impact of the Chiusure and Siena context on our residents’ practices? In what ways has the proposed project changed since arriving and why? And finally, what is artistic research and how is it done?

Tobi Maier: Thank you for meeting with us, Natasha. Could you tell us a little bit about where you came from? Where were you before coming to Siena?

Natasha Anderson: I was at home in Chewton, a small town on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, in the south-east of Australia. It’s about a one-and-a-half-hour drive north of Naarm/Melbourne.

TM: And you’ve been living there for many years?

NA: For five years. Prior to that we were in Berlin, and before that, Brussels. I grew up in another small, regional town in Australia, which I left aged 18 to study music at Melbourne University. I then studied the recorder in Amsterdam for five years, before moving to London for a couple of years. Having run out of visa options, I moved back to Naarm/Melbourne at the end of the 90s. And ever since, it’s been a bit of a back and forth, between Europe and the southeast of Australia, spending long periods of time in each, or coming over to Europe almost annually for tours and so forth.

TM: And which do you like better?

NA: Australia, at heart. I grew up a bit inland, in the country, where the light and the bush just get into your bones, bypassing your brain. And to be honest, I do find it a more inherently interesting place. Europe, having been so tamed and farmed for centuries, and its cultural practices so centrally disseminated, has somewhat less of a capacity to surprise, or overwhelm. It’s a bit of a push/pull thing. While it’s great to visit the dense population of Europe, to see and hear manifold things and to feel the ease and excitement of working in an environment in which to call yourself an artist is neither grand nor strange, it’s also a great thing to slip out from under the somewhat unassailable certainty that can underlie much European arts practice. Because this conviction can also carry the whiff of an insular arrogance, limiting the terms through which any work is approached. So I feel there’s a greater freedom to actually making stuff in Australia, if fewer opportunities to perform or exhibit on your own terms. And then, beyond such art things, I do feel a kind of grounding orientation, or a sense of responsibility, towards being in Australia. Of having white skin in the game, so to speak, and so needing to show up, on a basic level, for all the complexities that stem from Australia’s colonial past, and present. I don’t mean to sound at all grand here! I’m certainly no political activist. It’s just a sense that facing and seeking to understand such complexities, however very miniscule my part, are more fundamental than living the floating life of yet another artist expat.

TM: And Natasha, what’s a research project for you, how do you do your research? Could you tell us a little bit about that?

NA: Increasingly I tend to use my classical music training as a kind of lens or sieve through which to approach other materials, other histories or practices. In general, I’m fascinated by the ways in which sound in Western culture so quickly comes to be heard as a kind of material truth; to the point of even being understood as sounding reality itself. To give a very basic example; with a photo, we’re generally aware that it presents a framed point of view; whereas a particular microphone’s point of listening tends to elide into the very sound being recorded, and the sonic framing, whether technological, social, cultural or political, vanishes. In informing how we listen, this orientation creates what we hear. In general, Western systems of structuring sound tend to quickly be enlisted as natural and universal, vanishing the interface to position sound as a pure, universal truth. Historically this investment goes back to the Greeks, to their promotion of music as a primary study for its ability to be abstracted into a system of measurable ratios: this quantity compared to that. However, humans and politics being what they are, this quantitative measurement quickly collapses into a qualitative one, with number coming to underwrite all kinds of hierarchical binaries – greater/lesser, weak/strong, male/female, clean/dirty, and good/bad etc. But this bias, this deep desire for sound to be qualitatively more truthful than, for example, image, remains strong. It might morph its systemic home from century to century, but essentially it emerges intact. So, thinking through the modes – the media or the forms – that might trace how and where this desire manifests, and how I might enfold other materials and systems into its orbit, tends to be the basis from which I begin. It’s an interface applicable to many projects, from generic music commissions to those that encompass wider disciplines, materials or histories.

TM: You have also said that you were working on the recursive collapse of sonic material into language and meaning in European colonial art music. Can you tell us more about that field of your research? You touched upon it briefly in your introduction, but I’d like to know a little bit more about it.

NA: Well, it’s about looking at the relationships between sound, language and meaning. Looking for the structures through which ideology repeatedly informs material so as to produce meaning. A surface sheen, or narrative of meaning that we can all decide to invest in. Or not, as the case may be. This line of thinking seems to me especially pertinent to our digital age, as soft- and hardware increasingly command everything from our gestures to our attention to our livelihoods, fundamentally structuring all manner of possibilities. I know this can sound very 90s – crackling dry with critical theory and tediously academic! Just the kind of thing you’d run a mile from experiencing – witness the current collective desire to bathe in pure sonic affect!! However, what I hope is that my work manages, in some kind of way, to make the strangeness of these various underlying ideologies more perceptible; their gestural, iterative, rhythmic violence, for instance, or their animist hyperfictions, or the absurd nature of their abstracted presumptions. I really like the writings of Mark Fisher, especially his book on the weird and the eerie. So, it’s in a kind of ‘Fisherian’ vein that I hope my odd interweaving of musical and other material histories not only plays with the odd egocentrism of many Western systems of logic, but that it also manages to tap into their latent magical thinking.

TM: You’ve also told me a little bit about the Glacier research that you’ve been working on since visiting Switzerland in 2022, and how that could perhaps take on the form of a book. So, what are the forms you find for your instrumental, audiovisual, and acousmatic works?

NA: I have made stuff in various forms. From pure instrumental scores to electroacoustic works; and from multi-channel acousmatic pieces to partially-improvised electroacoustic solos that also use found text and/or video. Over a decade ago, I made some audiovisual works for handmade screens, as well as other kinds of material installations. Oftentimes the form depends on the context. Coming from a music practice, and really still working within such, you can get a bit stuck in generic or institutional expectations. Not only to do with money, or venue, or available instrumental or technical forces, etc., but also to do with the mediated experience itself. The audience expects a certain durational, performed thing, so you have to work at least partially within that, as opposed to following your nose with complete freedom to find the right form for an idea. At times this has felt like fitting a square peg in a round hole!

With this glacier project, I’ve realized I need to work outside the standard commission-performance timeline to give the project the space it needs. At the moment I’m experimenting with a book form partly because it fundamentally serves the project’s basic conceit; that glaciers have a writing practice equal to any such human practice. Currently I’m playing with how to create a certain density of images and text; from photos to notation to graphics and abstracted systems. I’m variously morphing or sieving each form of writing or representation through another, to see what then emerges from certain juxtapositions, or narrative combinations. Some of this script is sourced from music I have composed and recorded already, and I will make more music in response to what is coming out of these book experiments, but it’s also possible that the sonic side of things will remain simply as a trace of these activities; variously depicted and abstracted but not actually present.

TM: Last week we visited Venice together and I saw several artistic articulations that also used the medium of sound in exhibitions there. So I’m thinking, for example, of Zhanna Kadyrova’s organ for which the artist completed the organ pipes with fragments of fired Russian shells and installed it in the Ukrainian pavilion. Or I’ve been thinking of the Italian pavilion, which featured a composition by Caterina Barbieri, developed together with Kali Malone in a large-scale installation featuring organ pipes. The German pavilion on the island of La Certosa, featured a sound installation by Jan St. Werner in a ruin, but also by Nicole L’Huillier’s compositions playing from a reed area. Is that something that you’re also thinking about, how work can not only be performed, but also installed in exhibition spaces or in the public realm?

NA: I’ve done some installation and work for exhibitions. A number of years ago, for instance, the Australian artist, Sarah Pirrie and I, exhibited a work in Darwin based on the unique ecosystem of the mangroves up there. And in 2016 I made a 6-channel electroacoustic installation for the Sydney Symphony that worked with the architectural acoustics of a former train-making factory, eliciting, orchestrating and restaging these extracted voices in situ. Another time, for a dance theatre production, I installed multiple sound installations across the entirety of this venue’s vast space. And just this year I made a soundtrack for Richard Grayson’s exhibition at Matt’s gallery in London, matching his ‘hybrid nature god’ animations with my own sampling practice – processing slivers of haptic acoustic sound to create similarly weird, electroacoustic voices. And with three other Australian artists - Sabina Maselli, Erkki Veltheim and Anthony Pateras – I co-created the expanded cinema performance ‘Another Other’. This multi-screen, multi-speaker work, cannibalizing the linear structure of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’, ended up also being presented as an installation. More recently, for myself, I have been experimenting with a kind of dual ‘screen’ set up of motion-captured animation presented in concert with my own live electroacoustic performance. In a music context this sits delightfully awkwardly, but I have been thinking about how I could extend this idea within an exhibition context. In general, I would like to work far more in exhibition spaces. The work I really want to make is definitely heading in that direction. Speaking broadly, it would seem gallery audiences are perhaps more open to formal experimentation than music audiences. At least, there’s more of an art-critical history of reading work presented in such spaces in multiple, meta-textual ways, as opposed to the concert hall or even so-called experimental, underground venue.

TM: Are there curators in Australia that you think would be receptive to this research that you’re doing in Switzerland, for example, and exhibit it there?

NA: Maybe. There’s been some interest from a music venue programmer. I don’t actually know many curators! That isn’t or hasn’t been my world. And really, I’m still working out just what the project can be – what form, or forms, it can take.

TM: And as we’re standing here in your studio, we also hear the insects coming in. I was wondering if you could tell us about the recordings you are doing here.

NA: I’ve done a mix of recordings. To begin with, I did a series of recordings in a house Amant owns above the church, at the other end of town to our studios. Each afternoon, at a set time, I both filmed a particular view out of the upper floor window and recorded the ambient environment. At the time I was working from a preconceived idea as to what this material would become. I was thinking I’d weave the various takes of the image and sound in and out of each other, so that what initially appears a single, static domestic perspective, slowly reveals itself as a digitally interlaced, composite fabric. But when I started laboriously masking away in software, the whole idea suddenly seemed too banal, dead already. But in continuing to record – everything from people to insects to machines – another work became apparent – one which I hope manages to better listen in to the wide variety of forces currently shaping this place.

TM: So, was that then kind of like a meditative moment of your residency, that you went over there and filmed from 5.40pm till 6.10pm, switching on the camera to see what came in front of your lens?

NA: The image, which I will still use, is simply the domestic view from the window. So, while it’s certainly a beautiful view, looking out over the church to the Tuscan hills and ravines beyond, there’s a certain quotidian banality to it. Which is meditative, for sure, but since I’m recording the sonic environment at the same time, I don’t actually look through the lens but rather just sit and listen. It’s definitely grounding to do that while the microphones capture their perspective. Undoubtedly it tunes you into the wider network of forces constituting any environment.

TM: And that will then become a video installation, or you don’t know yet?

NA: Maybe. I did a similar thing last year, from my studio at home, which looks out over a large patch of invasive blackberries and gorse towards a train line and some bush. As the cockatoos returned home to roost at twilight, I filmed the 10 minutes between one train passing one way to Naarm, and another’s return. I then wove these takes according to an algorithm borrowed from Ada Dietz, the American weaver Alexander Galloway wrote about in his book, The Uncomputable. The audio strands, which were mainly processed FM synthesis lines made from golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers, were woven following the same algorithm as the image, with some brief lengths of environmental recordings also being cut in. So given that video, and this new work here in Chiusure, I am starting to think about making a series of these. Small, domestic, ‘environmental’ videos that digitally embody and weave their wider networked forces; critically viewed on a small laptop, rather than a large-scale screen.