Reiko Goto Collins: HAKOTO Performance at Glasgow Women’s Library
April 2024 | Glasgow International
Reiko Goto Collins presented a captivating live performance of HAKOTO in the intimate garden of Glasgow Women’s Library.
Excerpted from Glasgow International
Daisy Hildyard’s piece on the Glasgow International in e-flux
https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/616474/glasgow-international
Reiko Goto Collins’s performance HAKOTO was also in a garden, a smaller space newly created at Glasgow Women’s Library. Goto Collins made a delicate but more immediate connection with the plants there. She wore a wired leather sleeve with pads at the end of it, fitted with monitors that “read” processes of photosynthesis and transpiration as they happen in the surface of a leaf on a tree. These readings are then transformed into a sound that is audible to humans, via a speaker inside a wooden box lined with raw wool, worn on the artist’s back.
In the garden, Goto Collins greeted a young oak. She gently placed her sensor pads around one leaf. There was a moment of quiet. And then music bubbled from the leaf.
I would have guessed that photosynthesis, heard via contemporary performance art, might sound ecological and technological at the same time. Maybe watery, or ambient, and almost certainly glitchy. But whatever I was expecting in that moment, it wasn’t the sound that came out of Goto Collins’s backpack. There was a woody melody with drumbeats, the kind of thing you might hear at an imp party. It wasn’t funny exactly, it was delightful, but the difference between this music and the glitchy eco noise I had expected urged laughter. The sound rolled out and into the wider environment. There were sycamores growing over the nearby car-park fence. A breeze blew. The music burbled. All the trees danced.
Read more about the Glasgow International