The Band of Seven

A group of musicians moves around the circumference of an outside wall, disappearing and reappearing in random combinations, altering the composition of the music played by their instruments. Inspired by the mechanism of a musical box, the circular repetition is at once continuous and erratic, playing with the spectator’s memory and sensorial expectations instigated through the sign of repetition. Their strange clothes and head-masks made from fabrics, cardboard and straw, produce an aesthetic of poetic fantasy, an other worldliness enhanced by their effortless gliding around the wall. A band of anti-heroes, as the artist calls them, these characters change parts of their physical attributes as well as order of appearance each time they reappear from behind the wall: although they are part of a repetitive mechanical system, changes introduce unexpected incongruities. Repetition and difference occur simultaneously. At times all compositional elements (sound, image and tempo) run in tandem with each other, at times they dissociate, overlapping or becoming isolated. As in a ghost train, once the musicians leave the scene they pursue some unknown course, which may be the ongoing circulation round the wall or some more distant journey.