if (the seen) still exists for others
As part of a youth composition competition prize, I spent my first artist residency at a small, remote castle in 2016 at the age of 19. Having just completed the second semester of my composition degree, the days of this lonely month in the solitude seemed never-ending.
I still couldn't get to grips with this residency stuff of offering artists undistracted, pure and unconditional concentration on their artistic work. So I existed from meal to meal, haunted mainly on the yawning boredom that always accompanied me.
After a while, however, I discovered an old, abandoned and shabby church on the edge of the castle grounds. Inside: a small, manual, single-manual organ. Without any restraint, I began an aimless, aural exploration. I spent hours at, in and around this organ - mostly just listening to individual sounds for minutes on end from different places in the room and in a variety of postures, becoming strangely familiar with the church space and the instrument, sharing my boredom.
Towards the end of the residency, I set up a recording device during one of these hearing moments - a Zoom H2n, no high-quality microphone that could adequately reproduce my hearing experience. The resulting recording is not long, it is neither an improvisation nor a composition, it is merely an excerpt, a document, an archived auditory memory of the time I spent alone in the deserted church with this small organ.