The project Nachtgeluid (Night Sound) originated from the first lockdown of the Covid pandemic. Several times I made night walks through the completely silent inner city of Dordrecht, sometimes alone and sometimes together with others.
During these walks I recorded sound.
In my search for the most convincing experience of reality possible, sound has become an increasingly important medium in recent years. Where photography and video always maintain a distance – in a sense you always remain a spectator, an outsider – real-time recorded sound gives you the experience of being physically included in the events, of being part of them. Present and past can thus form an inextricable whole.
For the work Synchronize (2015), I had recorded the sound of a walk. This recording was meant to be played back later, through earphones, during a subsequent walk. The previously recorded footsteps set the pace for the new walk. Recorded sound blended with live sound.
In the work Merging Spaces (2022), a collaboration with Elia Torrecilla, improvised sound walks were made simultaneously in Valencia (Spain) and Badefols d’Ans (France). Through an open telephone connection, we both responded directly and actively to the other’s sound. In post-production, both stereo files were superimposed and thus a spatial sound construction was created in which the different geographical locations were united equally, as in one virtual space.
On the website Nachtgeluid.nl I frequently plan nocturnal city walks and share these special experiences with others.
Frans van Lent
The work of Frans van Lent can be described as a concept-driven research process which is guided by personal experience. Little or no material products are created during the work. Sometimes, an audio recording, or video, or some photographs remain, but very often a work ends in just a text, in which the process is described. These texts evoke an image, with which to make the process concrete, palpable and imitable.
A presiding formal aspect to most of these works is a symmetry in time, a beginning and an ending: a process starts with nothing and ends again with nothing. An activity has taken place, an image has been created, and it has also disappeared.
Collaboration with others artists and the curating of events are important and consistent aspects of his artistic practice. In 2014 and 2016 he organised the Unnoticed Art Festival in the cities of Haarlem and Nijmegen. In 2015 he initiated TheConceptBank.org, a free online database for performance concepts. Frans van Lent is initiator and editor of the websites UnnoticedArt.com and The-Artificial.org and is co-initiator/curator of 222lodge.
He published two books, Unnoticed Art (2014) and TheParallelShow (2018), distributed by Jap Sam Books.
Frans van Lent studied Art Education at the Academie voor Beeldende Vorming in Tilburg (1979)
and completed his MA in Fine Art at the MaHKU in Utrecht (2014).
From 2000 to 2020 he taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.
He lives and works in Dordrecht, the Netherlands and in Hautefort, France.