Life finds its way concluded the ArtHaus concert season with perhaps one of the most unique and conceptually bold proposals of the year.
The project brought together Charly Nijensohn’s new video installation, Life finds its way: A report by Dr. Borghi (2025), with Repeats in extended timee, the work of British composer Bryn Harrison, performed with impeccable precision by the local ensemble. More than a concert with projections, the evening functioned as a perception laboratory in which image and sound did not illustrate each other, but were expanded and expanded.
Nijensohn returns here to a question that runs through his entire work: To what extent can different artistic languages enter into dialogue with one another, rub against one another, infect one another or even reinforce one another? His impulse to unite art and life has a genealogy that should be restored. The starting point was Regeneration strategiesa multidisciplinary project developed six years ago together with Argentine and German biologists.
In a remote area of San Juan, the artist built three large clay structures – with tunnels and a reflecting pool – that soon became living habitats inhabited by foxes, frogs, Vizcacher’s owls and other birds of prey. The work was also carried out in collaboration with locals and the collective Las Mujeres del Desierto, led by Desirée De Ridder.
Camera traps were installed in these tunnels to record the animals’ behavior without human intervention. This was created from this material Report from Dr. Borghi: a scientific record that Nijensohn is now turning into art through a video installation with five large screens.
The nocturnal images, with a cold and desaturated color palette, form a minimal and ritual choreography: animals emerging, appearing, stopping and disappearing in a harsh, almost post-apocalyptic landscape. It is a world in which life endures like a silent pulse, barely perceptible but persistent.
Overlay this installation with Repeats in extended time It’s not just about adding “music + image” but rather about creating a time warping machine. Harrison’s work – about 45 minutes of a single structure – is based on the obsessive repetition of short musical gestures. Each instrument repeats its cell at a barely irregular pace, creating interference patterns in which everything appears the same and yet everything changes. Micro-detours of duration, attack, timbre or mood function as minimal breaths within a sound organism in constant change.
This rhythmic principle finds a strange echo in the logic of the video: the animals appear and appear as recurring motifs, almost identical but never the same. The work thus suggests a deep parallelism between the cycles of nature and the micro-variations of sound. Both layers – visual and musical – act not as a line over time, but as elastic matter that expands and folds.
What was experienced in the ArtHaus was ultimately an interruption in the time of perception. The viewer vacillated between hypnotically contemplating the landscape and microscopically listening to the music, caught in a kind of worldly trance. “Life Finds Its Way” does not convey a direct ecological message, but rather a state: that of a radical, almost meditative attention that brings its intensity back to the present.
A conclusion to the season that confirms ArtHaus’s vocation to take aesthetic risks and bet on experiences in which the boundaries between disciplines are no longer boundaries and become fertile zones of friction.
“Life finds its way”
Concert video installation. ArtHaus Ensemble. Bryn Harrison, Charly Nijensohn. Function: Saturday December 6th. Room: ArtHaus Auditorium.
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