Esprit de Corps

Installation (sound, electronic components, speakers camouflaged in rocks, neon light), 37 min.
Realized in collaboration with Laurențiu Coțac, following extensive conversations and a previous work made with Sonja Hornung

In 2016, together with Sonja Hornung, I stole a strange rock shaped speaker tucked into a bush near the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest. Two years later, I returned and saw the rocks were still there—only now, workers were adding more. Curious, I asked what they were for.

“For music,” they said.

“What music?”

“From the Mayor.”

I called the Mayor’s office and, after some persistence, confirmed that the rocks were indeed speakers for traditional Romanian music. The broadcast hadn’t started yet, but a press release was promised.

The idea of this daily soundtrack struck me as both amusing and scary, a tactic of nationalist brainwashing through sound terror. I began observing the site, subscribing to city updates and visiting regularly. Yet the speaker-stones remained silent, collecting dust and polution from the cars passing by. I started filming the rocks—mute relics of an unlaunched national pride campaign—and imagined them as sentient entities, each trying to assert individuality despite their identical molds. Inspired by Lev Vygotsky’s idea that self-awareness follows awareness of others, I imagined these rocks forming a sort of esprit de corps—literally, the spirit of the body. In the military context, the spirit belongs to a communal body, made up of individuals who often don’t know each other, but are brought together to fulfil a mission without the luxury of prior familiarisation. This degree of cohesion, often achieved in a short amount of time, is particularly important for their next mission. A high spirit means a good performance of this communal body. Beyond the military, the phrase is also used in sport and institutional contexts. The higher the index, the better the body’s performance in this collective form, the more the group shares a well-coagulated core. However, this communality implies a partial renunciation of the individual spirit of the body. And this dynamic process happens in motion, while executing the joint mission for which the individual has been placed in that group.

I decided to replicate the original object. My first papier-mâché attempt failed, so I collaborated with artist Olga Milczyńska to make ceramic versions. I also ordered 12 speaker stones identical in specs to the original—but when they arrived, they were slightly different. The supplier insisted they were technically the same, “just a different shape.” What, I wondered, made one fake rock better than another?

Soon, I had a collection: the original stolen one, its mold, the ceramic replicas, and the “improved” speaker stones—copies of copies whose flaws mirrored the capitalist systems that produced them. These objects became the basis for Esprit de Corps, an audio installation imagining one stone gaining consciousness and recognizing itself as part of a collective.

The audio script, created in dialogue with Laurențiu Coțac, mixes monologues and dialogues in English, quotes from poetic and philosophical texts about consciousness and the self, political and administrative quotes defining nature and what is natural, replies from online discussion forums about consciousness, the possibility of knowing the truth or exemplifying errors in mathematical judgment, with warm sounds (recreated digitally) seemingly collected from natural environments—sounds that indicate human presence (laughter, sighs)—as well as sounds that imply a military atmosphere (marching, Morse code, trumpet calls).

Opening with Beckett’s “What is the Word,” the script simulates a nonhuman awakening, with voices echoing between speakers—like cloned identities on different frequencies. Perec’s “Species of Spaces” and Szymborska’s “Conversation with a Stone” informed the atmosphere: one of isolation and eerie sentience.

In the exhibition, the rocks form a circle, lit by a floating neon-green ring—somewhere between a nightclub and cathedral. Their dialogue isn’t meant for us but for each other, and this becomes apparent in the last part of the script, where the ‘entities’ move on from communicating with words. As curator Julia Harasimowicz notes in the curatorial text of Aria Mineralia where the work was first presented, the installation becomes “a kind of modern panopticon, where nature imperceptibly transforms into masked technology for control.”

Presented as part of Aria Mineralia, Warsaw Biennale 2019, Do It By Heart.