Harp planted outdoors in soil. Photo: Beate Schirrmacher

Project: Instruments of Repair

Our project is about artists who place musical instruments outdoors, burning them or letting them decay in ponds, playing already abandoned instruments, and/or making new instruments from found materials. We are discovering how these artworks help us think in new ways about human culture in the natural world.

Facts about the project

Project managers and members
Beate Schirrmacher
Other project members
Heidi Hart, Crafoord fellow at Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)
Participating organisations
Linnaeus University
Financier
Crafoord foundation (One-year-research grant)
Timetable
1 August 2023 – 30 June 2024
Subject
Intermediality, Posthumanism, Ecocriticism, Music, Media Modalities (Department of Film and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities)
Research groups
Linnaeus University Centre (Lnuc) for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency (MEDEM)

More about the project

We approach re-natured instruments as media in their own right asking what instruments mediate when they are no longer primarily used as musical tools. In our analysis, we trace the interplay between matters, senses, signs and conventions asking what kind of experiences develop when we no longer listen for music but discover materials, experience different sensual and spatiotemporal dimensions and connectivitys. The re-natured and de-composing pianos push us to perceive more radical and elemental connections that go beyond our understanding of cultural meaning.

By standing in strange environments and being devoured by them, they do not mediate human-made music but convey a sense of connectedness and interplay with the elements. Fire, air, and water bring forth the materials and their construction that we usually treat as self-evident and only as a whole. The instruments, in return, make visible different forms of habitats and environments that we usually take for granted.

The project brings forth how renatured instruments can be used in shifting awareness toward ecological entanglement as connecting instruments of repair.

The project is part of the research in the Linnaeus University Centre (Lnuc) for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency (MEDEM)

Presentations and publications

Linnéuniversitetet Live: Hållbar konst och performance (Kalmar campus)

“Instruments of Repair” workshop with artist Julia Adzuki (Växjö konsthall)

Heidi Hart presents Harp Transplant at the National Resource Festival

“The Re-natured Piano,” Environmental Humanities Conference 2023 (Journal of Ecohumanism)

De-composing instruments Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher.

De-composing pianos. Transforming Musical Materials through Destruction and Decay. Univ. of Minnesota Press (forthc.)