NOTE: “Drag, Push and Pull (Friction Exercises) is a project that developed while staying in Rome for 2 weeks to work on another project that required me to travel with sound-recorders and microphones. During these 2 weeks I stayed at the American Academy in Rome (together with partner, child and occasional visitor) in a spacious apartment with a marble floors and heavy wooden furniture. I also had access to an equally spacious roof terrace with stone tiles and metal furniture. I mention these conditions because they became the tools with which I started to measure the physical and aural conditions of my surroundings.

At first without very specific intentions, I placed microphones on the floor and started to record my activities. I was aware of the potential of the space to become a studio; a place where one controls the activity that takes place in it, rather then a place where ones activity is controlled by the organization of the space and the things in it. I started rearranging the furniture and became interested in the sounds that I could produce by manipulating a piece of furniture by moving it through the room. I tried different pieces of furniture, different microphone positions, different ways of moving the furniture over different trajectories at different times of the day. My decisions were somewhat methodical and in reverence to the conditions of the space.

I was acutely aware of the fact that I was not alone in this place. I tried to not disturb the space for my companions which in the end of course I did do.

Once I established some methods in my “living-room/studio” I decided to apply the same principle to some of the public spaces that I visited during my 2 week stay in Rome. I placed a stereo microphone on the marble floor of a number of churches that I visited and carefully and in a minuscular way rearranged some of its heavy wooden benches. One of these recordings is part of the selection.

The final selection of the 6 recordings was based on the use of the word ‘drag”. To drag is to push or pull along a surface and to encounter resistance.