Camille Norment: Rapture

For the Nordic pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, Oslo-based Camille Norment created works with the glass armonica, an 18th-century instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin that creates music from the touch of fingers on glass and water, and a chorus of 12 female voices.  Weaving these elements together with the installation within the pavilion itself, she creates a multi-sensory space reflecting upon concepts of consonance and dissonance, and the water, glass and light of Venice.

Camille performs as a solo artist and with her ensemble consisting of electric guitar, Norwegian hardingfele, and the glass armonica, to explore the sensual and cultural psychoacoustics.  Sonic dissonance, and forms of cognitive dissonance are current motifs she uses to create various sonic, and cultural tensions.

She comments, “I am interested in how music has long been used to facilitate both the forging and transgressing of cultural norms. Sound permeates all borders. Throughout history, fear has been associated with the paradoxical effects music has on the body and mind, and its power as a reward-giving de-centralizer of control. Recognized as capable of inducing states akin to sex and drugs, music is still seen by many in the world as an experience to be controlled – especially in relation to the female body – and yet it is also increasingly used as a tool for control under the justification of war”.

Approaching the pavilion, one senses that something has happened, the windows of the pavilion seem caught and suspended in response to a tremendous force.  Entering into the pavilion large microphones emit a chorus of female voices to which the broken glass responds with tones from the glass armonica.  The composition is a haunting contemplation on the tritone that speaks of the tension between harmony and dissonance.  If, as the Norwegian experimental composer Arne Nordheim said, ‘music lives in the span between poetry and catastrophe’, the Nordic pavilion presents a sculptural and sonic installation torn between these two ideas, a space between a body in trauma and a body in rapture.