Toothless - 3-channel sound installation - 2023

Toothless is an installation that tells ten stories about four people getting hit in the head – with (very) varying effects.

A 3-channel audio composition plays over sports stadium horn speakers, combining storytelling and field recordings to tell an interwoven narrative of four historical instances of people getting hit in the head – from a hometown myth of a baseball curse, to a journalist’s attempt to hit George W. Bush with a shoe, to the police murder of a Boston student with a ‘less-lethal’ projectile. The narrative draws connections, preposterous and disquieting, between sports fandom, US imperial expansion, mass political protest and the performative violence of pro wrestling. Characters, as well as sculptural materials, switch places with one another, are melted down and formed again, sadly hit their targets or sadly miss them, dissolve into silt or pile up outside the dugout. A riot, a demonstration, a wrestling match.

To listen, viewers are invited to sit on benches and stools positioned throughout the space. Centrally located on a mound of red baseball infield gravel is an artist-made pitching machine, which is automatically triggered by a microcontroller at a climactic moment in the audio narrative to pitch a baseball directly through a window of exhibition space, smashing it, and bringing a symbolic act of violent destruction out of the narrative and in to the physical space. 

artist-made pitching machine (steel, aluminum, rubber, anti-corrosive paint, servo motor, microcontroller, sticker), 3-channel audio composition (21:17 min), stadium horn speakers, sugar glass, baseball infield gravel, steel, pine, ash, thumbtacks, silicone rubber, acrylic resin, piano keyboard, oxford shoes, MDF, vinyl, aluminum cans, sunflower seed shells, BIG LEAGUE CHEW bubble gum, ceramic, practice baseballs, foam rubber, graphite, pen and colored pencil on paper, printed pamphlets

dimensions variable

Script Editor: Julia Bosson

Sound Editor (Rijksakademie Open): Kim Nucci

photos: Beeldsmits