This autumn is scheduled to be extremely busy with many different interdisciplinary projects and residencies taking place, as well as several events - both streamed and for live audiences!

Therefor we took the opportunity to make some significant upgrades to the workshop suite, and to develop some projects of our own this summer.

New installation

Art student Vilde Stoke had a short placement at Wrap, during which she designed a re-contextualised install of the Mexican artist, Angelica Garcia’s work from her master in visual art at the Bergen Art Academy from 2006. The installation was donated to Wrap after showing at the masters final exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall and has been in storage ever since.

The work, which deals with physical and emotional/psychological scars, has become particularly relevant to Wrap in light of our long history with buildings, adaptations to buildings, demolition and conflicts associated with buildings. An accompanying audio part of the installation will therefore be re-made to fit the installations new context. In the mean time the work can be seen in Wrap’s communal canteen area.

New workbench

In our ongoing commitment to making Wrap’s workshop suite the best possible place for artists to develop large and ambitious projects in wood, metal and electronics, as well as working with polymers and paint, we have now built a new bench that combines a permanent mitre-saw station with other major improvements to the workflow in relation to woodwork. The bench, along with a new (and greatly upgraded) mitre-saw and other tools, were made possible thanks to funding from Arts Council Norway, Ustyrsstøtte Til Felesverksteder.

Speaker Park

This was History Disposal Unit’s main artistic focus last year, and the project has been invited to various venues around Norway, which we hope will materialise when the pandemic is over.

An interface designed to help composers create work for this 24-channel sound installation with spatial panning effects has been under development since the project began, but this summer, thanks to funding from Bergen Council, we were able to employ Leaf Preston Thorseth (BSc in Robotics and Inteligent Systems from UiO) to finish the project, which included some programming, laser-cutting and circuit board design and assembly.

The interface is known as ISPI (Intuitive Spatial Panning Interface) and is a 3 dimensional physical representation of the Speaker Park installation, with light/shadow sensors that enable composers to “pan” a selected track within the installation using hand movements, in a similar way to playing a theremin.

Recordings in Wrap’s AV Lab

Magic Soul of Flutes is a project by the flautist, Carlos Salinas (Peru/Norway) who learnt to play various traditional Andean pipes from his father, and spent several years touring in Europe with a Peruvian folk band before settling down in Bergen.

Salinas has composed a number of melodies that are rooted in the traditional music of the Andes, but which also reflect an international perspective. Several of these melodies formed the basis of an Audioglimt concert (at Wrap) in which he performed with other Bergen based musicians from Latin America. Since then, Salinas has been searching for the perfect collaborator to develop the overall arrangement of these melodies.

Finding local collaborations to be limiting, he eventually commissioned the Chilean multi-instrumentalist Mauritsio Vicencio to help him with the arrangement via remote communication between Norway and Ecuador.

Vicencio recorded backing tracks consisting of charango, guitars and other instruments at a studio in Ecuador, and Salinas is now recording flutes, percussion and violin to complete the recordings.

These recordings are being made in the AV Lab at Wrap, with Leo Preston as sound engineer.

Preston has also been collaborating with Stavanger based musician, Kjetil Hana, on a new track in Studio A. 

New season of productions

The end of the summer holiday season was marked by the start of three productions at Wrap. These are:

In First Person, by 71BODIES, will present a new chapter each day of this project, inspired and performed by transgender people from Norway and abroad.

We are happy to be co-producers of this project, which is the first to use our new streaming equipment that we have recently acquired with money from Bergen Council, as well as lighting and audio equipment from Wrap.

Catch the last chapters at 7pm CET here!

365 Pingvinar, by Open Window Theatre, is in the final stages of production before it premiers at Det Vestnorske Teatret (Theatre of Western Norway) on the 29th of August. It will run at Logen theatre until the 12th of September. The company is making adjustments to the set in Wrap’s Workshop Suite, while rehearsing and developing the performance in the White Room/Large Project Room.

New sound system. Lydgalleriet is moving into a new space in Strandgaten195, and in honour of this new situation they have collaborated with Paal Rasmusen of Norsk Radiofabrikk to create a unique custom sound system that can cater to the galleries diverse needs. The speakers are being made in Wrap’s Workshop Suite by Paal Rasmusen, Roar Sletteland and Julie Lillelien Porter, and will be installed in the new gallery in the coming weeks!