Nicole De Brabandere

Thick Smells, thin skins (2014) took place at the Kunstraum, Aarau, Switzerland. In this installation, a performer tempers chocolate at the back of an empty, plastic-wrapped space. The continuous movement of tempering sets a rhythm in motion that activates transversal resonances between the audible speech of a recorded audio track, the somatic operations proposed by the spoken voice and the phase changes of chocolate between liquid, solid and aromatic. The clearing and caving movement of liquid chocolate is a consistency that holds the relation between senation and discursive articulation in an orbit of repetition and variation. 

The somatic audio procedure is as follows:

(audible breathing)  wAFT (inhale)

swEET

THICKness (exhale)

swEET (exhale) breathing (inhale)

rAIsing hAIrs (inhale)

                                         HUmid between fingers, 

now sweeT 

on the wrisT (pause)

come clOser (inhale)

feels thicK (pause)

                                 Coursing in blood, gathering in joints (pause)

between the toes (pause)

warm build-up (inhale)

                          Seeing is heavy and slow (pause)

          the chocolate residue eddies 

  folding (pause)

holding folds (pause)

gathering flUid (pause) 

                      gummy gumming (pause)

guMMy  guMMING 

    sticKing nasal passages, throat, ears and eyes? (inhale)

                       Are you drowning in it? (pause)

Or (pause)

do you swim through its sonic depth (exhale)

Finding nOTEs of cherry and bariTONE?    (low humming)