In October 2020 Andy Lock will launch a series of new sound installations at the Natural History Museum, and make a presentation about his work, both as part of the University's Arena research program, completing artistic research he has been working on for a number of years.

During the renovation of The University Museum in Bergen it was discovered that an abundance of tiny bugs were eating the collection. These little creatures are unloved, disavowed and repressed, Andy Lock thought, and got the idea for a project about The Museum’s "wrong bodies", its "shadow collection". This is now part of Lock's Ph.D. project in artistic research.

In the winter of 2019, Lock began making small works about the Museum's infestations, as part of the First he made a performance in the Museum, letting his audience listen to the normally unheard sounds of the collection's infestations. When The University Museum reopened in Autumn 2019, he created an installation for its World Views exhibition, which put the Museum's "wrong bodies" - captured and catalogued by the institution - on public display.

The smallest bodies
Lock says his fascination for for the bugs has many elements to it.

-The significance of the museum’s infestations is perhaps most obviously that they consume matter; damaging the material of specimens and artefacts. In doing so, they can also consume data, whether this is the DNA contained in animal specimens or the words contained on a label or in a document or a book, but for me, they hold a further fascination.

-At the Natural History Museum, I set out to explore the relationship between the institution and the body. In this case, bodies which are so small they are largely hidden from the human eye, and furthermore, bodily presences which The University Museum ordinarily chooses not to publicly acknowledge.

-I hope to alter the perception of those who encounter my work. I am creating a series of sound installations at the museum, about its relationship to the infestations, which exist unseen in its midst.

The Museum's relationship to its "wrong bodies" also forms part of Lock's planned final PhD performance: a live-streamed, spoken-word performance, which explores interpersonal and institutional silences and the unspoken "objects" at their heart; drawing together his work at the museum and his writing about familial relationships.

Right body, wrong body
Lock first encountered the Museum during its long closure for renovation. He explains that what first attracted him to the museum was the sense of a site in parenthesis: all the apparatus, all the empty cabinets that seemed to frame only absence; however, he soon found that the absence was an inhabited space.

-At the Museum as elsewhere, what appeared to be an absence was in fact a site where something was repressed or looked away from.
The museum tries to order things, according to a system where there are the "right bodies" of specimens and has no way of speaking the other bodies which are present.  I became interested in these unspoken bodies and found that in the whale exhibit, Dermestid Beetles that live on the carcasses of dead animals, are infesting the skull of the Museum's Blue Whale's specimen. Perhaps being there for long enough to make them a part of the natural history that the museum is exhibiting.

Cyanide against beetles
Although such bodies as the Dermestid Beetles ordinarily remain unspoken, every now and then, some change or crisis highlights their presence. For instance, Lock is interested in how the museum has tried to get rid of the problem in the past, including using hydrogen cyanide gas, in the late 1970s.

-Using material from interviews with people who remember the Museum's fumigation, I have created a performance about these events, says Lock who has worked closely with the Museum and praises their support for his research and his ambition to bring the audiences who participate in his work, into contact with the unseen presences which occupy the silences at the heart of his artistic research.

Towards autobiography
Lock's long-standing artistic practice, before commencing his artistic research at KMD, had been concerned with image-making, using photography; ostensibly concerned with architecture and place and in particular, with images of rooms emptied of their inhabitants.

-Through my research at KMD, I realized that the architecture was just "a way in"; a way of inhabiting gaps, silences, unoccupied rooms or overlooked spaces in a cityscape. I was always seeking out such gaps, different lacunae", says Lock. - I was an artist working with photography. Spaces interested me, but after working within this frame for a long time, it was as if all my image-making could do, was to point at something else, without being to articulate it.

-It was creative, speculative writing and performance, created out of his explorations of the different sites at which he worked, including the Natural History Museum, which has ultimately allowed me to articulate and investigate what it was that my image-making could only imply. Also creative writing inspired by reflections on my own family relationships, themselves, understood as another site for investigation.

Silences in the family
In February 2020,  Lock created a spoken word performance "Between Our Words I will Trace Your Presence”, performed with actor, Idun Vik, for the Radio Space hosted by the Borealis-festival for Experimental Music, in Bergen. The work explores the silences that define a relationship between a son and his father. Reflecting on this work, Lock says,

-As time went on, it became clear to me that my fascination with silences and what they conceal and reveal, derives in large part from my own experience; the things unspoken in my own relationships and upbringing. I needed to understand where I stood in relation to my work and I decided to draw on my own experience, to explore how the silences between us and those seemingly closest to us, come to define our most intimate relationships, and shape our being. The relationship at the heart of "Between our words..." is full of repressed presence.

Silence talks
John Cage, the experimental composer and artist, considered that silence is always noise, silence is full of the things we are not listening to. In addition to Cage's work, Lock says,

-There is a rich heritage of artists and practitioners thinking about silence through their work. The silences we experience through our senses, in our environment, but also the silences we experience in families, between lovers, within institutions and beyond them. The relationships between people are full of things unsaid and unheard. My work has been informed by examples of art-practice, writing and film-making, which deal with these themes. For example, the work of film director Yasujirō Ozu and writer, Heinrich Böll, whose short story, "Murke's Collected Silences", set in post world war II Germany, features the eponymous character of Murke, a radio producer obsessed with collecting the silences he cuts out of  his radio programs.

Lock draws on these and other works, weaving images and characters from them into his own writing, to explore the silences he encounters at different sites and what they may disclose.

Facts: Arena is "a meeting place between academia and society, where research from the University of Bergen is communicated at the University Museum in Bergen, Natural History Museum".

 

Facts: Arena is "a meeting place between academia and society, where research from the University of Bergen is communicated at the University Museum in Bergen, Natural History Museum".