Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla. Fault Lines will explore the overlapping mechanics of polyphonic vocal texturing, geological and sculptural displacements, and adversarial rhetorical language in a new performance-based work, featuring an original composition by Guarionex Morales-Matos. The work will feature performances by young male vocalists from the American Boychoir School and the Transfiguration Boychoir. The performances will take place on the hour Tuesday through Friday from 1 – 5 pm with an additional performance at 5:30 pm, and Saturdays hourly from 12:30 – 5:30 pm.

Fault Lines
 consists of a group of ten stone sculptures whose formal vocabulary derives from geological faults – fractures or discontinuities in the Earth’s crust – and choral risers, a set of tall and wide steps used for standing while singing. While the mineral composition of the rocks in Fault Lines took millions of years to assemble, cutting, removing, and displacing sections of their hardened mass has caused an instant and ever-lasting rupture in geological time. The resulting sculptural permutations function as choral risers, which are dispersed throughout the exhibition space and used by two boy sopranos, or trebles, to engage in a verbal duel.

Trebles are known for their beautiful yet ephemeral vocal range that is subject to the inevitable effects of the dropping of the larynx, known colloquially as the “breaking of the voice.” Impermanence haunts the life of the treble’s voice. Its unique color, tone, and sound are limited by time. For Fault Lines, the artists have dug into the historical strata of adversarial language, excavating incendiary provocations from Cicero to Shakespeare, to contemporary political and literary figures alike, testing the functional power of these utterances, and taking note of their distinctive contours, shapes and marks. At the same time, the two boy sopranos re-animate these verbal forms of conflict in a carefully choreographed musical duel/duet where the voice escapes the letter, allowing the musical texture to take precedent over the word’s intelligibility. Fault Lines explores the complex mechanics of the voice produced in the space between the body and speech, between pure sonority and linguistic meaning.

Lacan considered insults a primary form of social interaction, central to the imaginary order. At once antisocial and crucial for human relations, both divisive and unifying, insults can be seen as signs of fissures in social and political civility that give rise to turmoil and conflict. Fault Lines tries to rehearse and recuperate these forms of anxiety in a public setting through a performative experiment which bears witness to the cracks that break open when geology, the voice, and emotion are put under stress.

Jack Smith
Theater and Performance Works
12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels
September 12 – November 1, 2014