Excerpt from "Staging Marvels" by Sylwia Chrostowska

 

"The visit continues by way of a staircase in the watchtower of the Maison Breton proper. During the descent, the visitor can hear, coming from within the inverted tree growing inside it, samples of experimental audio work by W. A. Davison, who calls his idiosyncratic take on surrealism "recordism." The recordist approach is the creative use of chance, automatism, and other techniques to turn ourselves into "modest recording devices," an expression used by Breton in the first manifesto. Although it is about making recordings - similar to the way a psychic medium relays and records messages from the spirit realm - they are not necessarily audio recordings, but also photographs, drawings, and texts that record an event or a thing. For the show, we have chosen to present a collage of sound improvisations."

 

"Staging Marvels" by Sylwia Chrostowska. Published in Merveilleuse Utopie exhibition catalogue, Association La Rose Impossible, 2024