Tremor Archive
Andreas Buchwaldt
July 12-22, 2023

Satellite Project Space
121 Dundas St, London, ON
Wednesday-Friday 2-7pm, Saturday 12-5pm

Opening Reception: Friday July 14, 6-8pm

In the 18th century German physicist, Ernst Chladni, poured sand on a thin metal plate and ran a violin bow along its edge. The sound vibrations passing through the plate organized the particles into intricate nodal patterns, changing shape within shifts in tone. Chladni was searching for a way to visualize acoustics, and the patterns that would later bear his name provided a groundbreaking method for studying the complex relationship between sound waves and physical objects.

Tremor Archive takes Chladni’s experiment and applies it to a reading of our present day atomized labour market, where workers, like grains of sand, are controlled by larger forces. Photographs documenting Canadian labour protests from the last one hundred years are pasted to hard backing and cut up. The pieces rest upon a repurposed industrial shelving unit and are physically animated by a series of vibrating electric motors bolted to the metal frame. Bodies and landscape are pulled apart, forming new compositions when anachronistic fragments collide.

Traditional forms of organized dissent in the west are struggling to keep pace with late-capitalist power grabs. Spikes in the cost of living and inflation can not be remedied by union power alone, as many entering the workplace are doing so as unprotected laborers. Visualizing this dissolution of power becomes one step in a search for new solutions. As such, Tremor Archive seeks to illuminate the complex interplay between historical struggles and contemporary labor dynamics.

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