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Óróapuls Harmonic Tremor / Ben Frost & Francesco Fabris

Spotlight on Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris's new exhibition

Rooted in the volcanic unrest of Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, Harmonic Tremor, the exhibition by Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris constructs an environment in which sound is not a medium that describes a landscape but one through which the world continues to occur; a world in which matter is an active, articulate force. This show is not simply the image of a geographic area in constant eruption but a negotiation between material, frequency, and time, where the listener is implicated within its understanding.

To approach Harmonic Tremor as an exhibition about landscape would already be to misunderstand its central proposition, because what is at stake is not the representation of a place but the dismantling of the latter as alive matter unstable to frame. The Reykjanes peninsula, repeatedly fractured between 2021 and 2023 by volcanic eruptions, is not merely treated as a distant site to be documented or translated into aesthetic form but as a landscape that survives through both material and sonic conditions. As a matter of fact, the very substances and frequencies generated through those moments of rupture are carried directly into the exhibition space, preserving their inherent instability. This approach fundamentally alters the role of sound within the exhibition.

Frost and Fabris refuse its conventional function as atmosphere or accompaniment and instead insist upon its capacity to operate as a force capable of changing matter. The field recordings gathered during years of research in Iceland are the manifestation of the soil’s turmoil. Among them, full spectrum analogue tape recordings, geophonic infrasound data, and contact microphones applied directly onto newly cooled lava produce a sonic language that exceeds the limits of ordinary listening. What reaches the ear is only one layer of a much denser field of activity, because many of these frequencies are first encountered through the body itself. In those moments of uncontrollable natural energy just like in the exhibition space, low vibrations travel through muscle, chest, and bone before they become consciously perceptible, while sharper resonances destabilise spatial orientation, dissolving the reassuring distinction between inside and outside, between the listener and the environment surrounding them.

In this way, the space ceases to function as a neutral architectural container and becomes something closer to a geological chamber, animated by continuous exchanges between vibration and material. The eight loudspeakers distributed throughout the installation are not merely tools for sound diffusion, but sculptural sites where matter visibly responds to sonic pressure. Their cones, filled with lava collected from eruption sites, establish a direct continuity between the volcanic events that produced the material and the frequencies now acting upon it. Sound does not metaphorically animate these surfaces, but physically displaces them. Through persistent vibration, fine lava particles slowly begin to migrate outward, spilling from the speakers onto the floor in movements so gradual they initially seem imperceptible; they shift continuously, rearranged by frequencies that keep the material in a state of perpetual negotiation. What emerges are traces produced neither by the artist’s hand nor by any predetermined system of control, but through the direct encounter between sound and volcanic matter. The floor becomes a surface of inscription where geological logic writes itself in real time.

The collaboration between the two artists is essential to sustaining this tension between immensity and intimacy. Frost’s practice has long explored sound as a physical phenomenon capable of destabilising perceptual certainty, whether through composition, installation, or performance. Fabris, whose work traverses acoustic ecology, multimedia installation, and data sonification, similarly approaches sound as something inseparable from environmental systems and material behaviour. In Harmonic Tremor, these methodologies do not dissolve into a singular aesthetic voice, but remain deliberately unresolved, generating a productive friction between technological mediation and raw elemental force. It is precisely this refusal of resolution that gives the exhibition its critical force. Its power lies not in metaphor, but in allowing the Earth’s processes to persist without reducing them into representation. The exhibition does not attempt to explain geological instability or translate it into a familiar human narrative, but allows volcanic matter, vibration, and duration to speak in their own grammar of pressure, friction, and displacement.

Óróapuls Harmonic Tremor / Ben Frost & Francesco Fabris

Credits:

Artists: Ben Frost / @ethermachines Francesco Fabris / @france.fabris
Venue: Nýlistasafnið (The Living Art Museum) / @nylistasafnid
Words: Giulia Piceni / @giuliaapiceni
Editor: Maria Abramenko  / @mariabramenko
Junior Editor: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci

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