HARBOR

Harbor is Karol Tyminski's performance of choreography and music, which explores the relation between the body and sound. In the presence of only one viewer the artist plays a music piece created as a physical, not sonic, experience. The sound transducers used during the concert - placed on the viewer's body - vibrate not only accordingly to the formal musical logic, but also reflect its emotional dimension. "Harbor” is a metaphor for a body which is washed over by acoustic waves that are set into motion by the performer. Their varying intensities and rhythms transform the bodily tissue into a musical landscape.

The performance, commissioned by Automatophone and supported by Krytyka Polityczna in Warsaw, stems from a challenge that has been placed by the members of the Polish hearing impaired association. How to translate the complexity of a sonic composition into the pure physical experience? This challenge resulted in pushing Tyminski to create a performance which turns up side down the approach towards music creation. In “Harbor”, which brings together def and hearing audience, the physical experience of sound waves is at its core while the sonic layer is limited to its minimum. Tyminski, playing live, establishes with the spectator intimate relation while guiding them not only through physical experience of music but as well through distant-touching of matter that is both non-human and human. The piece in that way addresses longing for physical touch in time when it is forbidden.

PW- Magazine

BONE 2022: Freed From Desire

The festival for performance and club culture explores with the topic DEEP_FOCUS, the politics of desire in landscapes built out of foggy clouds.

BY LEWON HEUBLEIN

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Just like in the wood workshop behind Reithalle, you are sitting tied up on a chair. Karol Tyminski is gentle while he places the other body of his 1-person-audience Harbour ­– a one-on-one-performance without any words – just with precise gestures. Not sure if it's a friendly command or absolute devotion. We are in this together now, so Karol places something on my chest: heavy metal sound transducers. Another one is also placed in the left hand. A mirror, round expanded clay, and stones lying strangely arranged on brown earth are building the set-up. Cables under small tables, where you have to kneel. What follows accompanies over the remaining festival days: A concert of non-human actors only for the body without sound or sonic experience, only good vibrations. Somehow and very concretely, through the wires, Karol is also connected to the other – in this case my – body.

The vibrations play their own partiture, sometimes careful, sometimes flirty as if they were a DM from a crush, sometimes the whole body shakes, almost like you are in a massage chair, helping me to let go. Instead of negative speculation, Harbor seems to be a question of how we situate ourselves in the world and that we actually have to do this anew in every moment in order to be in exchange with our environment. What Habour also shows out is that even questions of inclusion do not mean a compromise in art but open up new fields. The performance stems from a challenge that has been placed by the members of the Polish hearing impaired association. All the vibration that flows through us grounds us, not in an essentialist way, but more into a place of wonder about your own body. Getting surprised by yourself is still one of the most stunning experiences you have while navigating different and fluid versions of yourself through life. The arrangement provokes desires that you weren't aware of before: "desire's fundamental ruthlessness is a source of creativity that produces new optimism, new narratives of possibility," writes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in "A Poem is Being Written".¹ So it is not only the electronic streams that enliven but the implantation of new desires of which we were not aware before and which endow us with an unfamiliar agency.