Multisensory show in Nordic pavilion is poetic with a powerful political message

The mysterious power of women’s voices call visitors to the Nordic pavilion, which this year, for the first time, is the sole responsibility of Norway. Camille Norment’s sonic and sculptural installation, titled Rapture, animates the usually cool modernist space, becoming a living skin, according to the curator Katya Garcia-Anton.

A coronet of microphones placed high on the ceiling project sound outwards in a circle, a hum of female voices whose unresolved harmonics represent the “evil interval”: power and the fear of women. Just as music arouses physical and emotional responses—hairs erect on the back of the neck—so the materials of the building vibrate to the sound. The angular giant white frames surrounding the installation over pools of their own broken glass signal the power of sound to shatter.

Norment, magnificent in black against the white pavilion, played her armonica—Benjamin Franklin’s glass and copper-bound cylindrical instrument—accompanied by the sonorities of the electric guitar and the Hardanger fiddle. Its high-pitched frantic rhythms were produced by Vegar Vardal, spinning through the rapt audience with vertigo-inducing twists and turns. This intimation of a male ecstasy compliments the forthcoming performance by Norment and David Topp. Here hysteria, the “female disease”, and its spread to the male (First World War shell shock and post-traumatic stress today) will draw from Sarah Teasdale’s poem “There will come soft rains”: nature will inevitably heal and cover catastrophe.

Multisensory, poetic with an oblique but insistent and powerful political message: bravo!