'HORIZON' - Bike Tour for 2 audience members and 1 guide at the Csepel Works factory complex.
"I am on a bike ride through cobblestone streets in Csepel Müvek, the partly abandoned industrial park just south of central Budapest. It is a late afternoon in April, the sun is about to set, making the old brick buildings and tall chimneys glow in reddish brown. I follow closely behind David Somló as part of his bicycle-soundtour Horizon. It is just the two of us. I have two small portable loudspeakers attached to my body, one on my belly and one on my back, but there is no sound coming from them yet. We ride in silence through narrow passageways and along some dirt roads, past warehouses and old foundries, rusty iron gates and factories with broken glass windows, worn down residential buildings, and here and there some piles of rubbish. I remember from David’s presentation in Moss a few weeks earlier that one is not supposed to initiate any conversation or make any kind of unauthorized noise while attending his sound tours. After a while I start to notice the sounds around us, the wind through the trees, birdsong, and the distant thump of heavy machinery. We make a short stop beside a big industrial fan, just listening to its loud mechanical noise. Further down the road I get a bit upset by two dogs coming at us, barking aggressively from behind a fence. I start to think that the loudspeakers are just a trick to make me become more aware of the sounds from the surroundings, which may be a nice enough idea. Though after a while I start to notice another sound that doesn’t seem like it’s coming from the wind or the trees or the factories; a slowly rising, ambient tune that appear to be following us. I have by now forgotten all about the loudspeakers, it’s been maybe 20 minutes, or half an hour, and I’ve fallen into the slow, dreamlike rhythm of the shifting sounds and the soothing movements of the bike. The new sonic element intensifies the intimacy and subtle drama of the situation. I feel nostalgic, almost romantic, as if I’m in a movie from the 1960s, La Nouvelle Vague-style (I’m later informed that the “cinematic” feeling wasn’t all that wrong, but that the inspiration for the work came from Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Stalker, with Csepel, probably, as the mysterious and ambiguous “Zone”, something which of course makes a lot more sense). David makes a careful gesture with his arm, pointing left, and we turn toward an open plain and stops in front of the Danube. A panoramic view of one of the biggest waterways in Europe is all of a sudden in front of me. The movie goes into widescreen for a grand finale, as the last sunrays glimmer in the slow waters of the river." - Arve Rød
Created as a part of the PICTURE / Budapest - Østfold site-specific residency program.
