JOHANNES BERGMARK
Improvised musical performance art with amplified objects and instrument inventions.
Johannes Bergmark makes, among many other things, surrealist musical object theatre with an evolutionary meta-instrument or amplified stage called the Platform. With his main activity as an experimental musical instruments-, sound sculptures/-installations/-environments maker, improvising musician, writer and electroacoustic- and text-sound-composer, he has developed over butoh, sound poetry, jester theatre and performance art into a kind of audiovisual object theatre performed as a concert but with a setting as a surrealist puppet play of toys, tools, kitchen utensils, materials, weird and kitsch decorative things and junk found on streets and flea markets. The objects bring their history and connotations as well as their often microscopic sound potentials on the little stage, made from a cupboard door with a hidden contact microphone under the floor (usually amplified without any electronic treatments), suspended over the table with a clamp like a springboard into a poor man's utopia where the junk will dance it's own dance.
JB has been an increasingly touring free lance musician since he graduated as a piano builder in 1996. He also lectures, makes pedagogical projects and workshops, usually focusing on untraditional acoustics, using also traditional crafts and basic sound technology, hoping to unfold a world where knowledge, skill, inspiration and surprise can meet and develop together and to inspire people to create their own poor man's utopias out of available resources.
In his attitude a surrealist as well as a skeptic, rather than an artist.
He resides in Stockholm, where he has been active in the association for radical and experimental art, Fylkingen (chairman twice), at the Electronic Music Studio, in the swedish skeptics' association Vetenskap och Folkbildning and The Surrealist Group in Stockholm.
Photo: a solo concert at Audio Art Festival, Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków. The concert was broadcasted live and the recording can be seen here. Photo to the right above © by Mikołaj Zając, published here and here.
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Updated the 1st of July, 2020.