The fourth instalment of our podcast is an original sound work in response to our Triple Harvest callout by London-based artist, collaborator and researcher Anja Borowicz.
Before transitioning to art, Anja studied industrial engineering – an experience which instilled an enduring affinity for industrial landscapes, diagrammatic instructions and thinking across taxonomies. This made her response to Corby steel industry heritage films particularly insightful.
Anja recently collaborated with a neuroscientist to stage GestureLabs, where the public responded to archives of recorded body labour while their movements were recorded in a purpose built booth. This project palpably informed her approach to the documentary footage of steel workers. Just as she has captured poetry in the repetitive movements of human bodies at work, her piece extracted : crashed : smelted finds the music and humanity in the sounds of an industry populated by large metal monsters.
extracted : crashed : smelted uses shifts of mono and stereo and is best listened to via headphones.
A transcript of the vocals in this work is available here.
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All Images – Stills from video collage, source material: Double Harvest & Iron Ore in Britain (© Corby Borough Council), Anja Borowicz, 2020
Anja Borowicz uses sculptural objects, moving image and soundscapes to create installations that enhance embodied experiences of the visitors. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art and she received the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize. Her works were selected for Aesthetica Art Prize, TIAF London and City Methodologies [UrbanLab]. She is currently a research candidate at the Royal College of Art, investigating everyday working gestures as spaces of material resonances and poetic metaphors.