Waving platforms

Building upon the material and creating tangible work on site, Paul Devens situates his waving platforms: designing and staging cultural resonance and amplifiers. The exhibition at Onomatopee both serves as a small overview exhibition surveying this body of work via documentation and exhibits some works and elements of work, often outside their original and natural habitat but open to shift our sense of space and to capture the soundness Paul Devens sets out for.

’Waving platforms’ positions itself literally and figuratively as a dipolar field displaying a dichotomy of vibrant idealism and static power. Static power resonates with the surface of reality, as its prescribed minimal living space answers to the ambitions of power institutions or systems of control to which the ideal user is subjected to eliminate his subjective idealism. Not being able to partake in planning creates need and weak social positions, even insanity, disease, terror…

The surface of reality becomes a waving platform along both the site’s constructive elevation and its auditive transpositioning which resonate and/or amplify. This socially constructive work plays on the ephemeral in order to make our hearing, in a broad sense, receptive.

“ One has to register the investigative imagination of Paul Devens as the active paradigm of investigation associated with the field named sound art. Devens is sailing from sound art, yet his works exhibit a wide range of interests that go beyond mere sonic qualities of sound objects. In his works he intervenes in the urban realm, with an interest in both the physical and social aspects. He employs techniques of architectural production carefully selected from the inventory of shaping physical environment, as well as historical and political re-discoveries. Custom-made objects and creations lie at the core of some of other interventions as well as video projections. Some of these works try to capture or re-capture a social reality, and try to achieve a synthesis of sorts: sometimes one of facilitated and augmented, and sometimes one of a derived nature.”
- Emre Erkal, in the upcoming publication.