Simon Heijdens
Role: Curator
Year: 2014 & 2016
City: Austin
SILENT ROOM, SXSW 2016
A 40’/12 meter long matt black building that is fully soundproof and anechoic, in which visitors spend a moment alone, excluded from any sound or colour. Like a black hole in its outside environment, Silent Room’s interior blocks out all sound coming from the outside, and absorbs any sound that is made inside, while the monochromic lighting filters all colours out of the space.
An immersive experience of silence and peace, devoid of any visual or audible manifestation but the self – a rare, unmediated state. A rare moment of silence and reflection within the chaotic and exubrant environment of SXSW.
Silent Room’s sound profing technology through acoustic decoupling of spaces has been developed by Simon Heijdens in collaboration with the Acoustics department of the University of Texas over the course of 2015. The work was commissioned by SXSW Austin Texas, where it had its first exhibition in March 2016, after which it was exhibited in Washington DC in January 2017, IFFR in Jan 2018 and ART Rotterdam in Feb 2018.
TREE, SXSW 2014
Ripples on a puddle of water, footsteps in the sand and slowly gathering grime. Natural processes are existent though becoming rare in our increasingly planned surrounding. While the trees on the streets are no longer nature but carefully controlled and managed, the wind that is moving its branches still is. An installation that traces and amplifies the leftovers of nature in the urban surrounding.
White silhouettes of trees projected 8 meters high onto the facades of several buildings in a city. Its branches and leaves are moving, slightly or intense - directly to the actual wind that passes the facade of the building on which it is projected, as measured by a wind sensor. Starting full of leaves at dawn, the tree looses one of its leaves each time someone passes it. The movement of the tree is not pre animated; because the actual wind animates the tree, it's movement is always different and reveals passing wind patterns, and what time of year it is, like a real tree would. When the leaf breaks of its branch, it drops down on the ground in an alley nearby. Because the leaves are made of light, they slowly brighten up the alley as they grow in amount over the course of the evening, and form a developping image that reveals the use of the city. The leaves roll out when someone walks through them.
Biography Simon Heijdens
(b.1978 Breda, The Netherlands)
Simon Heijdens reinterprets natural processes with unique technologies and embeds these in man-made surroundings, to create mechanisms that reveal the hidden essence of a place.
Artworks that continuously transform and evolve in response to their surroundings, affected by meteorological conditions such as sunlight and wind, and human interaction. While technically complex, his installations are understated and poetic in appearance, gracefully balancing between the visible and the visible, and seamlessly integrated into their environment. They evolve almost organically into a new kind of nature within urban settings, questioning the importance of locality, nature and coincidence in an increasingly organized and urbanising world.
His works are part of the permanent collections of museums such as MoMA New York, the Art Institute Chicago, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam and V&A London, and shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Haus der Kunst Munich and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Moscow, among others.