Zekarias Musele Thompson
Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS
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spatial facilitation (the artist is presence)
sonic performance and dialogue at Hamraborg Festival in Kópavogur, Iceland
August 31st, 2025
movement, saxophone, electronics, wireless transmission, facilitated discussion
~70 minutes
spatial facilitation (the artist is presence) was a performance at the 2025 Hamraborg Festival in Kópavogur, Iceland, presented on August 31st and structured in three movements. In the first, lasting thirty to forty minutes, I traversed exhibitions and installations of the festival, alongside other places of note along Hamraborg, in dialogue with the objects, materials, and beings present through the saxophone, inviting the audience to walk with me. Simultaneously, the signal of the saxophone, amplified through electronic effects, was transmitted by wireless microphone to a room in Catalína, where a second audience was invited to wait and listen. The two audiences rejoined when I arrived on the stage at Catalína and continued playing for ten to fifteen minutes, after which we held a facilitated discussion of what each half of the audience had seen, heard, and encountered. The wireless transmission to stage was a formal move first developed in this iteration of the series; it has carried forward into subsequent iterations, including spatial facilitation (the artist is presence) #2 at CULT Bureau later that year.
spatial facilitation is an ongoing project of mapping clearer vision through walking, noticing, the breath, and the saxophone. The term is borrowed from physiology, where it names the stimuli that contribute to the accurate processing of visual information: the things we see that help us see more precisely. In the project, the term expands to apply to all forms of sensory perception. The saxophone, amplified through electronic effects, becomes a tool of attention rather than a performance instrument: a way of listening to a site through the act of sounding it, and a way of facilitating the audience's perception alongside the artist's own. Analog solutions for analog problems.
all pictures by Magda