Building upon the material and creating tangible work on site, Paul Devens situates his waving platforms: designing and staging cultural resonance and amplifiers. The exhibition at Onomatopee both serves as a small overview exhibition surveying this body of work via documentation and exhibits some works and elements of work, often outside their original and natural habitat but open to shift our sense of space and to capture the soundness Paul Devens sets out for. 

’Waving platforms’ positions itself literally and figuratively as a dipolar field displaying a dichotomy of vibrant idealism and static power. Static power resonates with the surface of reality, as its prescribed minimal living space answers to the ambitions of power institutions or systems of control to which the ideal user is subjected to eliminate his subjective idealism. Not being able to partake in planning creates need and weak social positions, even insanity, disease, terror…

 The surface of reality becomes a waving platform along both the site’s constructive elevation and its auditive transpositioning which resonate and/or amplify. This socially constructive work plays on the ephemeral in order to make our hearing, in a broad sense, receptive.

“ One has to register the investigative imagination of Paul Devens as the active paradigm of investigation associated with the field named sound art. Devens is sailing from sound art, yet his works exhibit a wide range of interests that go beyond mere sonic qualities of sound objects. In his works he intervenes in the urban realm, with an interest in both the physical and social aspects. He employs techniques of architectural production carefully selected from the inventory of shaping physical environment, as well as historical and political re-discoveries. Custom-made objects and creations lie at the core of some of other interventions as well as video projections. Some of these works try to capture or re-capture a social reality, and try to achieve a synthesis of sorts: sometimes one of facilitated and augmented, and sometimes one of a derived nature.”
 - Emre Erkal, in the upcoming publication.

As it is been told by Toine Horvers himself:

"As an artist, I work with spoken and written language in performances, drawings and books. My material consists of the results of observations of situations and processes which I see or hear occurring in reality.

On a weekday in 1999, from a fixed point inside Chartres cathedral, I made an hour long sound recording. At the time of recording, no organised religious activity was taking place. The building was being visited by tourists and groups of believers who were talking, praying and singing.

In 2013, I began to translate this universe of sounds into words and sentences, without stating the source of the sound or referring to the physical space of the cathedral.

In order to be able to approach sound as autonomous energy, I stripped my language of the styles and tools which are often used in describing sound: sound imitating words, words derived from seeing, words conveying human feelings, poetic / expressive phrases, technical sound and musical terms, similes and metaphors.

Wherever possible, I replaced words of Latin or French origins with words that I felt were more descriptive in nature.

All these restrictions and interventions were important in my attempt to come closer to the fundamental nature of both language and sound through listening and writing."

Or, as it is told by curator/editor Freek Lomme:

"Besides being the house of God, a cathedral also functions as a resonance box.  The sound of a falling needle resonates a lasting bounce and seems to extend its voluminous presence, as you’re probably familiar with. But then again: how can we describe the sound within such resonance box purely?

In an attempt to report on the sound waves in this resonance box as objective as he’s equipped for, this project bundles the result of a one-hour exercise by language inspired artist Toine Horvers: capturing and registering the waves from their moment of departure to the moment fading, in between take-off and landing to our receptive sphere. By sheer focus and sharpening words he attempts to reach out for the sound and the resounding nature of both the auditory as the issued levels of this volume and to get closer to the effective state of this nature.

For only as it reaches out for the unheard and for the not quite fully pronounceable, it is that this very exercise set’s out for a deeper tonal of our intelligibility. Can we write a report within this sphere objectively? Can we get closer to the movements of these waves?"