Above an extract of the audio

2025

Sound installation

05:50 min

Four speakers and two custom-made wood and metal benches

Variable dimensions 

Aaron meets Nina on a bench

“What is this thing called time?” – Nina Simone

Aaron meets Nina on a bench is a spatial sound composition using four speakers. The audience sits on custom-made benches to listen—for a time—then moves on. Aaron Ferderer, a young oceanographer with a PhD based in Hobart (Tasmania), whom I interviewed in 2023, reflects on the paradox of time in an imagined conversation with Nina Simone, echoing her 1969 performance of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” in New York. Aaron’s solastalgia meets Nina’s melancholy in a shared attempt to conceptualize time. Two recordings enable an impossible dialogue. A sound synchronicity that bends time, while meditating on it.