Jump to...
Rekodi Maji Exhibit - Opening Night - November 20th
Rekodi Maji Exhibit - November-December
Rekodi Maji - Reflections - November 21st
Rekodi Maji Exhibit - November-December
Rekodi Maji - Reflections - November 21st
An opportunity to hear reflections from Rekodi Maji's first float in Biddeford, ME through conversation with Walter Kitundu and film by Jorge Cousineau. What did the water tell us? How can we keep listening?
Walter Kitundu is a Tanzanian-American multidisciplinary artist and educator. He creates sculpture, sound installations, and large scale public art works that address place, history, nature, and community. Kitundu also builds extraordinary musical instruments and mechanical devices when he isn’t obsessively documenting the natural world as a bird photographer. Kitundu is the director of Kitundu Studio, which focuses on the development and installation of public art works. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008.
Rekodi Maji (record the water) is a project/artwork by Walter Kitundu in conversation with waterways and the communities which they surround. The sculptural heart is a kayak adorned with strings, floats, anemometers, and sound-makers carefully calibrated to respond to the sea state, the movement of the boat, and the weather conditions. This instrument, both scientific and musical, will record sonic data as Kitundu paddles past coastlines and islands and into bays and inlets. The kayak itself serves as a resonant chamber to amplify the sounds of strings and tines on the hull. Each journey will produce a unique composition, an audio rendering of a particular line traced on the surface of the sea, lake, or river.
Kitundu considers the relationship of people to water as an ongoing composition with recognizable movements. He contrasts Indigenous ways of being in connection to waterways to the industrial era where settlers often saw them as little more than a power source, waste stream, and thoroughfare. Tourism and fishing have ushered in a new movement where water quality is a priority and steps are taken to care for and restore waterways and the habitats they make possible. The sonic and visual data collected in these journeys is meant to be carefully examined in search of markers of change and possibility.
Can we hear an eroding shoreline or detect a steadfast rocky outcropping? Can we discern the difference between sounds from a revitalized waterway and those from the crumbling remnants of long abandoned mills draped with cormorants and neglect? What lessons and stories are held in the water and how do we retrieve them and make them legible?
Rekodi Maji (record the water) is a project/artwork by Walter Kitundu in conversation with waterways and the communities which they surround. The sculptural heart is a kayak adorned with strings, floats, anemometers, and sound-makers carefully calibrated to respond to the sea state, the movement of the boat, and the weather conditions. This instrument, both scientific and musical, will record sonic data as Kitundu paddles past coastlines and islands and into bays and inlets. The kayak itself serves as a resonant chamber to amplify the sounds of strings and tines on the hull. Each journey will produce a unique composition, an audio rendering of a particular line traced on the surface of the sea, lake, or river.
Kitundu considers the relationship of people to water as an ongoing composition with recognizable movements. He contrasts Indigenous ways of being in connection to waterways to the industrial era where settlers often saw them as little more than a power source, waste stream, and thoroughfare. Tourism and fishing have ushered in a new movement where water quality is a priority and steps are taken to care for and restore waterways and the habitats they make possible. The sonic and visual data collected in these journeys is meant to be carefully examined in search of markers of change and possibility.
Can we hear an eroding shoreline or detect a steadfast rocky outcropping? Can we discern the difference between sounds from a revitalized waterway and those from the crumbling remnants of long abandoned mills draped with cormorants and neglect? What lessons and stories are held in the water and how do we retrieve them and make them legible?
