Toothless

3-channel audio installation

2023

Toothless is a performative audio and sculptural installation. A 20-minute 3-channel audio piece, combining storytelling and field recordings, tells 10 interwoven narratives of four in- stances of people getting hit in the head – from a hometown baseball myth, to a journalist’s attempt to hit George W. Bush with a shoe, to the police murder of a Boston student with a ‘less-lethal’ projectile. The narrative explores a permeability of spaces created through contexts of violence. Characters, as well as sculptural materials, switch places with one another, are melted down and formed again, sadly hit their targets or sadly miss them, dissolve into silt or pile up outside the dugout. A riot, a demonstration, a wrestling match.

To listen, viewers are invited to sit on custom benches and stools. They are surrounded by prop-like objects: baseball bats of varying sizes, rubber manhole covers, beer cans covered in thumbtacks, a po- dium with an Oxford shoe protruding from it.

Centrally located on a mound of red infield gravel is an artist-made baseball pitching machine, which is automatically triggered by a micro- controller at a climactic moment in the audio narrative to pitch a base- ball directly through a window of exhibition space, smashing it, and bringing a symbolic act of violent destruction out of the narrative and in to the physical space.

video excerpt:

Toothless, artist-made pitching machine (steel, aluminum, rubber, anti-corrosive paint, servo motor, microcontroller, sticker), 3-channel audio composition (21:17 min), stadium horn speakers, sugar glass, baseball infield gravel, steel, pine, ash, thumbtacks, silicone rubber, acrylic resin, piano keyboard, oxford shoes, MDF, vinyl, aluminum cans, sunflower seed shells, BIG LEAGUE CHEW bubble gum, ceramic, practice baseballs, foam rubber, graphite, pen and colored pencil on paper, printed pamphlets

Script Editor: Julia Bosson

Sound Editor (Rijksakademie Open): Kim Nucci

produced with the support of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam

photos by Beeldsmits