d w e l l i n g
Collaboration between Masaya Ozaki & Lilja María
A b o u t t h e d u o
Masaya Ozaki and Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir recently formed a duo that creates performances inspired by everyday aesthetics and temporalities in the landscape.
While they had their first performance as a duo only recently, Masaya and Lilja have been working in the field of music for many years, exploring similar themes. Their common interests in collaborative creativity and finding inspiration within one’s everyday surroundings led to the formation of the duo.
Their first project dwelling is an ongoing creative process where they use walking as a method for creating new pieces. The first part of the project is inspired by walking routes between Masaya’s home in Vesturbær and Lilja’s home in Seltjarnarnes. During the walks, they collected sounds, images, and objects, which they used to build the piece.
The piece has certain site-specific elements, and every time it is exhibited, they adapt the piece based on the space where the piece is shown. While using the foundation created from their original walks, they include inspiration from each exhibition space, so every performance has its own characteristics.
The piece can be exhibited in different versions, everything from a 30-minute concert performance to a long durational performance installation.
A b o u t t h e p i e c e
The piece is inspired by everyday aesthetics. Therefore, the starting point became the homes of the artists and each of their everyday surroundings. During the walks, Masaya and Lilja started to notice certain navigational themes in their areas. This included a lighthouse and a broken compass keychain, where the magnetic needle that shows which direction is north was missing. Additionally, their attention was drawn to various plants, which seemed to grow into endless and unpredictable paths. They started to call them ‘compass plants’. From there, they discussed ideas such as: ‘what would a compass of unpredictability look like?’
An image of one of the plants gave them an idea for an extended visual score based on the idea of reading into the depth and the layers of the score instead of focusing on a horizontal or a vertical read. They call the score a ‘well score’, inspired by the depth of the image as well as the shape of the lighthouse they came across on one of the walks.
The score is created during the performance and is constantly changing, creating new layers and textures. The score is created with ink and a melting piece of ice that spreads the ink in unpredictable directions and creates new paths. As the melting ice activates certain colours and creates new layers, the music develops alongside the changing ‘well score’ and sounds made by the melting ice.
