A June performance of Displaced Horizons at SITE Santa Fe with musicians, from left, Dylan McLaughlin, Robert Lundberg and Ryan Packard.
Robert Lundberg wants to give us the opportunity to think differently about water.
“It’s something I’ve become totally obsessed with over the last eight years or so,” says Lundberg, co-composer and video director for Displaced Horizons, an upcoming multimedia performance and exhibition taking place at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 27, in Gallery 7 of the UW-Madison Humanities Building. Displaced Horizons includes five channels of video; a 90-minute score performed live; and printed materials including maps, the musical score and a program of text and images.
The project started after Lundberg read William Fulton’s 1997 book The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. The book details the early city’s critical need to seek water in other regions. “That opened my eyes to this huge reengineering of water,” says Lundberg, who is studying at UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies while also pursuing a law degree. “I was fascinated by these gigantic systems that allow us to live and profit in these ways, but without seeing the infrastructure that make them happen.”
Film still showing shelters on a beach created as part of a dam and reservoir project.
While touring the United States as a bassist in 2009-13, Lundberg, who currently plays in New York City-based JOBS and Nestle, rooted in the upper Midwest, became tuned in to the intermingled water systems of the cities he visited. The idea for Displaced Horizons started flowing during Lundberg’s summer 2017 artist’s residency focused on water rights at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. The water system there exists in a historical patchwork, Lundberg explains. Indigenous irrigation systems were built upon by Spanish colonizers and then layered over by U.S. waterworks.
The video in Displaced Horizons — shot by Lundberg, Chris Jonas and Dylan McLaughlin — includes kaleidoscopic images, streams swirling past mossy creek beds, dams surrounded by dry waterways, and heatmap images of lush river valleys. Lundberg wants to tell the story of water, he says, by “taking these systems that are designed to be in the background and make them the focal point of seeing all of the complexities embedded in the infrastructure — whether it’s physical or intangible.”
The musical score for Displaced Horizons, part of the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities Terra Incognita series, will be performed by a sextet of experimental musicians from Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Fe, including guitarist John Dieterich of indie avant garde mainstay Deerhoof. Lundberg will add double bass, and Jonas, the Santa Fe artist who shared in scoring and creating video for the project, will play saxophones and vibraphone.
The music provides a sonic backdrop of improvisational jazz rock layered with spacey ambience and abstract vocals.
Lundberg hopes that presenting these ideas in a multimedia platform will create an more open-ended environment for people to draw their own conclusions on water issues in the modern world: “[I’m interested in] creating a space that can shift peoples’ experience for a moment and just maybe resonate with them in a different way than they would in their normal day-to-day life.”
