Stijn Demeulenaere, Nothing’s going to happen to us…, 2014.

Stijn Demeulenaere, (Belgium, 1978), Nothing’s going to happen to us…, 11’57”, 2014.

Nothing’s going to happen to us… investigates how our perceptions of an armed conflict relate to a lived reality. For the installation Stijn interviewed people who had lived in conflict zones, and talked with them about the sounds they heard, and the emotions those sounds evoked. From this, he took 1 story and asked 2 sound designers specialised in designing the sound for action movies, to tell him how they would create the sound for this particular scene. By confronting these perspectives Nothing’s going to happen to us… wants to research the no man’s land between imagined emotions on the one hand and real memories on the other. Between an artificial presentation of danger, and a lived memory of it. Both perspectives are delivered to the audience at the same time, using surround sound. Each voice has it’s own spatialisation as they tell their stories over, under and against one another. The spectator needs to construct his own story from the continuous entanglement of information delivered to him. The installation also refers to Flanders own history by using the sound of exploding WWI bombs – to this day, around 3000 bombs of WWI and WWII are still found in Belgian soil per year. The installation also uses sound from contemporary conflicts in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The sounds of these battlefields aren’t heard directly, but are modulating the voices of the people speaking, enforcing a chaotic framework on the memories and perceptions of the testimonies.