Crossover Frequency Spectrum
Lower Levant Company in collaboration with Gaetano di GregorioSix channel audio, steel truss, fiberglass and resin IWATA-300, 600, 1200 horns, clay IWATA horns, compression drivers, copper slag.
Via the thoroughfare that connects the front of the pavilion to SOUNDR, lies Cross Frequency Spectrum, a steel truss supporting a six-channel horn speaker system. Each Iwata horn, repurposed from audiophile culture, is tuned with crossovers to specific frequencies, focusing each horn to different recordings: local bats chirping, whistlers and cracklings from the ionosphere near military antennae, field recordings from the LLC acoustic mirror in Asomatos, Limassol, in proximity to the UK SBA of Akrotiri and sounds from the Venice canal through the Organ (Rafailia Tsiridou, Emiddio Vasquez). Recordings across scales of magnitude and locations, that call for an adjustment of the senses and an attunement towards soundings that are often present, and even extremely loud, but not easily audible – not unlike the geopolitical occurings across the seemingly ‘quiet thoroughfare’ that is Cyprus.
The wave of copper slag serves as a material bedding for the mixed-clay ceramic horns by ceramicist and architect Gaetano di Gregorio, offering an alternative mode of listening reoriented to the land. Zooming out, the slag doubles down as an overused metaphor for Cyprus’ geological formation and history as a site of copper extraction. Offering a new twist to the island’s ‘emergence’ in the Levant region as an ‘antenna island’, it has led some to even speculate that the conductivity of the copper found in the soil across the island may be one of the reasons why radio transmission stations were set up in Cyprus, since it would enhance the electrical grounding of antennas. To continue and extend the metaphor, when thinking of copper slag as a byproduct of copper production, one may be provoked to speculate what the byproduct of these listening and transmitting operations – ongoing until today – might be, towards rethinking the island’s complicity in regional conflicts.