June and July at Titanik unfolded me: the days were full of writing, thinking, and listening through headphones–hiding from the heat in the studio at the gallery with my mixer, pedals, and a jar of tisane. The nights, then, were for walking by the river and poems, sometimes there were secrets, and always this untouched blue light that softened my mind to possibility. In between was the sea off the coast of Kustavi and Ruissalo; also dear friends and new friends and handfuls of strawberries.
I arrived in Turku with a valise of ideas (preconceived) and each day, I emptied it until there was nothing left of what I thought I knew or wanted–then: I let the work build around me. This residency at Titanik allowed for my work to have a life of its own–for it to take me by the hand and show me what it wanted to become. And it was in this spirit that I was able to compose new works for an installation and a performance, to collect a series of acoustic recordings and poetics for use in latent projects, and to take three rolls of 35mm photographs.
My four-channel acousmatic installation for Sibelius Museum, “Grief is a dream,” was created during the first two weeks of my residency. The piece was intended to offer a public space to be and feel: to let grief rise to the surface and be witnessed vs. repressed. I’d be remiss to not thank Mindy Stock for helping me to produce the final piece, and Kaisa Henttunen for letting me record the majority of the soundscape in her gardens.
My residency concluded with a performance at Sibelius Museum titled, “Open the water: an oratorio in three parts.” This collaborative effort between myself and Lotta Petronella was an experimental and aleatoric composition centering the voice as an instrument. It brought focus to the musicality of language and was rooted in the belief that music is, above all, the vibrating of acoustic waves between bodies.
It is August, and all I have are thanks: to the many beautiful people I met and befriended at Titanik, to the Sibelius Museum and its staff, to the collaborators I had the extraordinary pleasure and privilege to work with, to my time at the residency which is hard to fully articulate but resounds, reverberates, across the distance ~
Chanelle Allesandre
New Haven, Connecticut
25 August 2025
