art.set Fondation Beyeler
By Lost Souls of Saturn X Olafur Eliasson
This performance was filmed inside Olafur Eliasson’s installation «Life» at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, where he flooded the museum interior and filled it with plants. The audio is presented as an ambisonic binaural recording of ambient music, processed field recordings of the museum grounds, and the live amplified sound in the museum’s interior. When we left the shooting of this video on July 15, 2021, we saw some more flooding, as we drove through water and rocks brought into the streets of Basel by the Rhine river overflowing after a summer of heavy rainfall.
About the Artists
Lost Souls of Saturn are Seth Troxler and Phil Moffa, plus further opaque participants. They congregate to combine music, new technologies, and storytelling into an inextricably linked whole, within an immersive and engaging audio-visual performance environment. Through Lost Souls of Saturn, Troxler, Moffa et al. explore new ways to open doors of perception and challenge the ways we see our world, whilst marrying the prescient visions, political aspirations and psychedelic energy of science fiction and early rave culture, with postmodern philosophy, and contemporary art.
The works of artist Olafur Eliasson explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Born in 1967, Eliasson grew up in Iceland and Denmark, where he studied from 1989 to 1995 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians, and specialised technicians. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe.
Special thank you to: Susanne Battke, Sam Keller, Fondation Beyeler, Misic Sound, Agi, Dan, Amadis, & Domenic of Nordstern, Klangmalerei, ARTE, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Kim-Lillian Strebel, Christie West, and Ed Cartwright.