Wind Chime Festival

View documentation from the IRL Wind Chime Festival here.

CHORUS and Laurel Schwulst organized a chime festival to accompany the digital public exhibition, The World Wide Wind Chime Festival. This pop-up public art event took place on Saturday, May 21, 2022 in NYC from 11am – 4pm in the Vale of Cashmere, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY.

An excerpt from the open call reads as follows–

Over the past year, we (Ellie Hunter and Laurel Schwulst) have been chatting about how the wind and wind chimes could be a good medium for this global moment we find ourselves in: moving through the third year of a pandemic, with a promise for spring and new life …

Wind chimes have roots in ancient cultures all over the world. Among many functionalities and histories: in China they are used to maximize the flow of chi, or life’s energy; in Japan they are hung up in the summer and understood as a cooling mechanism; in ancient Rome they were used to ward off evil spirits …

This idea for an artist-made wind chime festival began through conversations we were having about public art and wanting a more democratic access for art in the public realm, especially with heightened considerations around the conditions of gathering with other people. We love the idea of wind chimes as an object that has endless connective potential … the way you can understand its presence before seeing it, or the way you reconnect with the movement of the wind and its feeling on your own skin, its spiritual connection, and even its cooling or healing possibilities.

We’ve been talking about this idea for a while now and realized this spring would be the perfect time to organize our wind chime festival. So we are inviting you to create your own! The only requirement is that you’re able to physically bring your wind chime (or have a friend do it for you) in NYC for our May event.

the wind chimes reveal themselves slowly. beacons tucked into corners, on the next little ridge, up the path, hidden right above your head. you must keep your eyes peeled. ask questions. watch the flow of others on their visits and discoveries. the wind chimes and their creators surround you by the very fact of geology in the vale of cashmere. the vale is a dip in the earth, a hole created by a glacier melting 17,000 years ago and tearing rock and soil into an arena of blue and green. you walk in the center, around the pond, ringed by trees, braving short distances of sun. each branch is a potential host. some chimes scream for you from across an expanse. large or loud. others are experts in camouflage, as if they were species native to the vale, perfectly blended. the chimes come in all forms and materials, hard and soft, objects recycled and refabricated to hang and collide with each other at the slightest disturbance. without the wind blowing, they invite you to touch. you must graze, lightly prod, slightly destabilize them to release their sounds. hear their rumbles and whispers, feel their different textures. the trees have alarms. the vale is an instrument now.

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