Saddled With

Natasha Barrett builds audiovisual architectures live and lets them collapse. Kelman Duran, who has produced for Beyoncé, closes the night with dembow slowed dark and heavy.

What if something curiously beautiful survives?  Constructions of Collapse and Desire by Natasha Barrett begins from a feeling of curiosity and hope in the face of a precarious world.

Real locations– Oslo's Barcode district, a rural train station, a snow-covered forest path–are projected into the space and transformed into dreamlike audiovisual architectures, pushed towards extremes of purity and energy. Barrett scanned the places she chose as source material using 3D LiDAR and ambisonic recordings. Live on stage, she constructs lego-like structures, feeding the real-time image into the evolving audiovisual environment. Then the fragile construction is blown apart, and forces beyond human control take over.

Kelman Duran arrives from a different vantage point. Rooted in Dominican and Afro-Caribbean musical traditions, his music draws on Caribbean riddims and dembow: syncopated patterns of bass and bodily pulse that he stretches and darkens into something atmospheric, saddled with emotion. The beat slows, the bass grows heavy, the edges blur.

The brutalist presence of Trekanten holds it all: Barrett's image and sound structures, and Duran’s nocturnal drive.

Programme

21.00 Doors open

22.00 - 22.45 Natasha Barrett Constructions of Collapse and Desire (2025) For electronics, 3D sound and real-time video.

23.30 - 01.00 Kelman Duran Solo electronic set

Want to know more?

• Natasha Barrett on her piece: "The work was inspired by global disasters, but as an optimist with faith in science and technology and a deep love of nature and the world around us, I wanted to express beauty rather than destruction."
• Kelman Duran is a Dominican-American producer, visual artist and filmmaker whose work moves between music, image and questions of displacement, memory and community. He emerged from LA's underground RAIL UP crew, has produced and written for artists such as Beyoncé, and scored Lola Quivoron's Rodeo, winner of the Coup de Coeur at Cannes in 2022.
• Oslo's Barcode district, a row of glass and steel towers built on the old railway yard, remains one of the most contested urban developments in recent Norwegian history, celebrated as architectural ambition and criticised as the privatisation of public waterfront space.
• A riddim is a groove or instrumental pattern rooted in Jamaican dancehall and reggae. Dembow is the syncopated pulse in reggaeton. In Duran’s music, these forms are slowed, stretched, darkened and made unstable.