video with footage from the public “playing” and from the rehearsal for the performance of January 24.
TSONAMI FESTIVAL, Valparaíso, Chile, January 2026.
Summer 2019 we built Spring Tide, at a windy location in the dunes of South West Denmark, for the Wadden Tide Festival. Here we put three resonant “huts” on three tiny hills and a wooden tower in the centre. Near to this tower we attached a bearing and a metal plate to each spring. The wind brought the metal plates into movement and these, on their turn, hit the springs in an extremely unpredictable way. This installation was the starting point for Muelles en Movimiento, realised for the Tsonami Festival 2026. The final configuration of the installation worked out very differently. As in Denmark, Muelles en Movimiento consists of six metal springs, three resonant “huts” and six metal plates, but here the design is defined by architecture, not by nature. The large balcony of the theatre of the Parque Cultural in Valparaíso turned out to be ideal for placing the huts and from these huts we connected the springs to a wooden tower at a distance of around 12 metres. The biggest difference with its predecessor was the lack of wind at the location, which made the metal plates hardly move. Our solution was to leave the activation of the springs to the visitors themselves, inviting them to hit the springs with a rod, while listening in one of the resonant bodies. This simple form of “analogue interactivity” worked very well in a public space like the Parque Cultural, which attracts all sorts of people taking part in cultural activities such as dance, music or yoga, as well as families spending the day outdoors with their children or dogs.
On January 24 we gave a performance, together with Alejandro da Silva, activating the springs ourselves from below, in the patio of the complex.
This project has been made possible thanks to the Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE) of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).
