September 29 - October 5, 2014, Nicosia, Cyprus
Park in Progress is a nomadic mobility program initiated by the Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes, supported by the European Commission’s Culture programme. The program brings together young artists and cultural professionals working collaboratively across transdisciplinary practice — bringing circus, performance, music, visual art, and technology into dialogue. The 11th edition took place in Nicosia during the “Nuit Européenne de la Jeune Création” (European Night of Young Creation).
Within the historically rich setting of the Municipal Gardens, near Nicosia’s UN buffer zone, this unique artistic intervention emerged as a celebration of the fusion between bodily movement and the spatial sound universe. The collaboration between J3ZZ (sound artist, composer) and Audrey Louwet (trapeze artist, Compagnie Azeïn) created an unforgettable evening where circus arts and immersive audio met in unprecedented ways.
The 16-speaker spatial audio installation was conceived following an intensive residency period during which J3ZZ recorded and developed a vocabulary of sounds produced exclusively by the human body — breath, movement, heartbeat, and physical effort transformed into a nuanced sonic palette. These recordings, meticulously processed through Ableton Live, formed the foundation of the installation: speakers positioned throughout the gardens created an immersive soundscape that responded to and accompanied the performance.
Audrey Louwet’s aerial performance, executed with her dog Eran, transformed the outdoor space into a living theater. The trapeze artist’s movements through space — suspended, dynamic, graceful — engaged in direct sonic dialogue with J3ZZ’s body-derived soundscape. This was not accompaniment, but rather a mutual conversation: the body in motion generating sound, the sound shaping perception of movement. The audience experienced not a performance watched from a distance, but an immersive environment in which sound, movement, and place merged.
This collaboration exemplified Park in Progress’s core mission: to demonstrate that transdisciplinary artistic approaches open new horizons of expression and perception. By bringing together circus acrobatics, electronic music, spatial audio design, and site-specific performance, the work posed essential questions about how art can activate and transform public spaces, and how diverse artistic practices can create entirely new forms of experience and meaning.
