Wilson Tanner Smith (us, finland)

//BIO

Wilson Tanner Smith is a composer, cellist, improviser, and performance artist whose work prioritizes a sense of Presence, or the Present—as it is in a space, place, among these people in this room—and the signals we receive from the world around us. Originally from Philadelphia, with creative roots in the improvised music and dance-theatre communities of Chicago, Smith is arriving to Narva after developing cross-disciplinary music and performance art work at the Estonian Music and Theatre Academy in Tallinn and Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
 

// PROJECT DESCRIPTION
I aim to use the residency period to further develop a performance/composition practice that can reflect the cross-currents and signals that we confront while simply living in the contemporary world, with the goal of creating a sound & performance installation that draws material from the Kreenholm and Narva River/Border areas. Topics for research include: the invisible forces that flow underneath the surface of a person’s lived experience in a given place. An invisible border lies somewhere in the middle of the river, invisible radio waves bring news as well as ordinary chaff from all over the world, awareness of a conflict being carried out maybe 1,500km away, being carried out here… These loaded elements, all while we may be here in this still point.