The Whistle

The Whistle – VACUT group

Sound installation curated by Zaira Oram

21 October – 27 November 2022

Wasserturm, Zurich, CH

Like an architectural flute hiding in the urban fabric of the city, the ancient water tower of Zurich will once again come alive with the sound installation The Whistle. The work is conceived as a site-specific intervention by the collective body VACUT (Voices Against Corruption and Ugly Trading) conceptualized with the singers Ale Hop, Aya Metwalli, Gabi Motuba and Sabina Leone by Swiss artist Gilles Aubry following the invitation of Zaira Oram. For the third event of OTO SOUND MUSEUM at the Wasserturm in Zurich, the voices of The Whistle will pass through the silent body of the tower to open from the inside out.

The installation The Whistle features voice recordings presented inside the Wasserturm, water tower in Zurich, audible from the surrounding public space. Informed by data leaks and NGO reports highlighting Switzerland's involvement in international money laundering, tax evasion, and predatory extraction of raw materials, the work seeks to address the affective cost of racial capitalism from a situated perspective. The VACUT Group (Voices Against Corruption and Ugly Trading) was formed to this end, gathering sound artists and musicians from countries involved in dubious business activities with the alpine nation.

The work relies on voice as an embodied manifestation of perceived social and environmental injustice. Each performer engages with a number of sources documenting corruption, land grabbing, human exploitation and environmental devastation in their home countries, along with their own perception of such phenomena. They respond to this experience through vocal improvisations in the course of recorded sessions. Assembled into a composition, the voices blend with the local ambient sound in Zürich. For the visitors, listening becomes a matter of participation, empathy and accountability, an invitation to attend to one's boundedness to near and distant realities.

The project further interrogates existing acoustic representations of Swissness, a term rebranded in the 1990s for marketing purposes, largely associated with attributes of fairness, precision, reliability, political stability, naturalness and cleanliness. An early example of Sonic Swissness can be found in the composition “Symphonie Les Echanges” by Rolf Liebermann, created for the 1964 Swiss national exhibition in order to introduce the visitor to the interaction of the economy in a novel way. Another instance can be found in the Sound Tower installed in Bienne by Andres Bosshard for Expo.02. Essentially a streaming dispositive for immersive aural experience, Bosshard's Klangturm offers a perfect metaphor for neoliberal soundscaping—smooth, consumption-oriented, and depoliticized. Following the rejection of the Responsible Business Initiative by a majority of Swiss voters in 2020, conversations on Sonic Swissness certainly deserve an update. This imperatively should include voices from populations bearing the actual human and environmental cost of Swiss wellbeing, well beyond the country's own borders.

VACUT Group members: Ale Hop (Peru, voice); Aya Metwalli (Egypt, voice); Gabi Motuba (South Africa, voice); Gilles Aubry (Switzerland, conception); Sabina Leone (Switzerland, voice).