Recuerdos II is a new sound installation by artist Jim C. Nedd, commissioned by Haus der Kunst for the Terrassensaal.
Jim C. Nedd is a photographer, artist, and musician with roots in Colombia and Italy. In Recuerdos II, he explores the powerful connection between sound and memory. The piece serves as a counterpart to his debut monograph, Remembering Songs. It establishes a sonic afterimage to his photographic work by creating an environment built from field recordings and snippets of music captured on the street, with the assistance of sound technician Pablo Martinez.
Recuerdos II creates an environment within an environment, an augmented reality overlaid on the Terrassensaal. Excerpts of music and the sound of busy streets and crowds are interwoven with the artist’s recitation of passages from My Bones and My Flute by Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer. Nedd reinterprets the text through a Caribbean dialect, which he esteems as a contemporary vernacular language rather than a vulgar form. These passages describe an everyday scene, an urban landscape with trees engulfed by an endless flow of traffic. The trees grow old, die, decompose, and the cars seem to rust and decay.
In his photography, Nedd draws on local mythologies of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, capturing scenes of sonically charged environments where the mundane and theatrical exist simultaneously. Intermixed with the ecstasies of celebration are intimate portraits often cast in stark shadow. Both the visual and the aural elements suggest memories of exaltation and tragedy that linger long after the moment has passed — moments shared by couples, by crowds, and in relation to the natural environment.
“In reality my photography is already charged with music and sound. I’m obsessed with creating pictures that can suggest what the sound could potentially be around the image, from complete silence to blasts of noise at Verbenas and Parrandas (community gathering / parties),” says Jim C. Nedd, describing his artistic work.
Nedd comes from a long line of singers, composers and accordion players who carried on the tradition of Vallenato music, a popular Colombian folk genre. Vallenato songs reflect the entire emotional spectrum of the people of the region using European instruments like the accordion, African percussion, and indigenous peoples’ instruments such as the guacharaca. For Nedd, these songs have become waypoints to remember events, festivities, joys, and catastrophes.
