ÓRÓAPÚLS / HARMONIC TREMOR – Ben Frost & Francesco Fabris

Nýlistasafnið / The Living Art Museum, Marshallhúsið, Reykjavík, IS

Harmonic Tremor emerges from several years of fieldwork in Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula where a series of eruptions between 2021 and 2023 reshaped the terrain. The work encounters the Earth as a sounding body, where landscape is not treated as a static object of observation but as an unfolding event. Sound functions here both as memory and as an immediate physical force; a document of geological rupture and a medium through which that rupture is re-animated directly into the present.

Loudspeakers diffuse a spatial composition woven from hours of field recordings. The sound in motion—gathered by the artists through various techniques including full spectrum analogue tape recordings, geophonic infrasound data collection, and intimate application of contact microphones placed directly to the newly cooled lava—moves like a tectonic drift, enveloping in a field of shifting resonance.

Over the course of the exhibition eight speaker cones, each filled with lava collected from the eruption sites, transform the exhibition space into a reso­nant chamber of geological sequence. Fine particles of lava placed in the speakers are gradually pushed outward through vibration, spilling across the floor. These moving grains form unstable drawings that slowly evolve and accumulate, exposing layers of sonically charged strata; reflecting a process of deep time that shapes the surrounding landscape not only of Iceland but beyond, through millennia. The landscape is not merely heard but is itself the act of hearing.

Curator: Þorsteinn Eyfjörð

Graphic Design: Petter Spilde

Production: Francesco Fabris, Ben Frost, Þorsteinn Eyfjörð, Daniele Fabris
Special thanks to:
Daniele Fabris, Dustin O’halloran, Dorothea Olesen Halldórsdóttir, Hákon Bragason, Lawrence English / Room 40, Sunna Ástþórsdóttir, Stjórn og starfsfólk Nýlistasafnsins, Board and staff of the Living Art Museum