Bosphorus

Abstract

Bosphorus is an interdisciplinary audio-visual installation by Joshua Horsley and Magda Stawarska-Beavan, created from film of real-time crossings from East to West and vice versa.

My contributions of the musical, sound diffusion, and installation aspects of the work were developed in studio (2016) and through public presentation (2017-18). Bosphorus engages with the Bosphorus Strait as a meeting point of East and West. It reflects upon the concepts of border and crossing, holding the specificity of its subject in balance with the universality of its themes

The project presented me with a number of artistic and compositional challenges not least that of conveying the concepts of border and crossing through music. This also raised the wider question of whether and how issues pertaining to migration might be communicated through immersive audio-visual art.

The solutions to these problems involved the development of new approaches that triangulated art music composition, acousmatic presentation, and immersive installation art. The music is composed entirely by editing, filtering and spatializing field recordings recorded by Magda during crossings of the Bosphorus in 2014, preserving the immersive sound world of the Strait. Tonality is vague, resisting resolute positivity or negativity, offering simultaneous possible narratives with the Strait signifying both borders and navigations, yet as Blackburn (2017): points out, ‘This example demonstrates that political or activist works do not have to rely on text or voice to communicate issues related to migration.’

Immersion through acousmatic presentation is achieved with each loudspeaker representing cardinal/inter-cardinal points, with the music navigating, moving, and travelling around the listener.

Bosphorus has been published in a variety of media and contexts. It has been presented as installation at the 4th International Biennial of Casablanca (2018), in concert at MuSA (2017) and TIES (2017), and via streamed video online.