For the exhibition Disquietude. Architecture and Energy in Portugal Christoph Brünggel was invited to create a sound installation that echoes the multifaceted experiences with hydroelectric power plants in the Douro Valley. To activate his installation Turbulent Currents on the opening night of the exhibition, he plays a live set of sounds from different energy landscapes. During the performance he combines hydroelectric sounds from Portugal and the Swiss Alps with those of a geothermal power plant in Iceland, a waste-to-energy-plant in the city of Zurich, and wind turbines in Galicia.
This sound performance is part of his ongoing work dealing with architectures, technologies, and landscapes of energy production – as topologies that are in a sense non-places because they are uninhabitable, often fenced and even dangerous zones. At the same time, however, these geographies are of great importance for society and therefore classified as critical infrastructures. For this work, Brünggel sonically explored the emissions of the machines, the conversion of energies and the architectural structure of the facilities through field recordings. By combining these recordings live with electrically generated and designed sounds from an analogue modular synthesizer, he creates a composition intended to reflect the human exploitation of flowing more-than-human forces such as water, heat, air, and electricity.