Washington People: Monika Weiss

The forest is never silent. Winds blow, leaves rustle, trees creak and sway.

Music arises slowly, beneath the birds and crickets and katydids. The electronic hum washes outward from two steel columns. Sound burbles like water, clangs like a bell, pines like a human voice.

“I’ve always created music alongside other forms,” Monika Weiss said. “I trained as a musician. During the pandemic, I was stranded in the studio with my piano. For months, I was completely focused on improvising and recording.”

Weiss, a professor of art at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is discussing “Metamorphosis (Sound Sculpture),” a new commission for St. Louis’ Laumeier Sculpture Park. Set in a small glen near a dry brook at the bottom of a steep ravine — “a natural cathedral,” Weiss calls it — the project grows out of a larger cycle inspired by the Greek myth of Daphne.

Experience “Metamorphosis (Sound Sculpture),” Monika Weiss’ new commission for St. Louis’ Laumeier Sculpture Park. (Video: Whitney Curtis/WashU)

The myth goes like this: Daphne, daughter of a river god, is devoted to Diana. But when Apollo is struck by Cupid’s arrow, he pursues Daphne until she collapses near a riverbank. “Destroy the beauty that has injured me,” Daphne pleads to the waves, in Ovid’s famous retelling, “or change the body that destroys my life.”

And so Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree, her leaves a symbol for music, poetry and triumph.

“I’m very interested in that myth,” Weiss said. “In Western culture, there have been many incarnations and responses. Ovid, Bernini … The assumption is, ‘What a beautiful story! The woman escapes!’

“I want us to rethink that,” she said. “The piece at Laumeier … I imagine the sound of my own skin changing into bark. The tree is stronger than us. The tree lives longer than us. It has roots in the ground. But there’s an element of trauma.

“Daphne is dying as a woman.”

Born in Poland, Weiss studied classical piano at the Warsaw School of Music and completed her master’s in fine arts at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In the early 2000s, she accepted a long-term residency at New York’s prestigious Experimental Intermedia Foundation.

“Piano was not enough for me,” Weiss remembered. “Composing was not enough. I needed everything. Experimental Intermedia became my artistic home — and honing ground.”

Like “Metamorphosis,” many of Weiss’ early works explore themes of the body, water and classical antiquity. Her multisensory installation “Koiman” (1998), inspired by St. Catherine of Siena, featured 80 gallons of pumping black motor oil. For “Ennoia” (2002), Weiss submerged herself in a large concrete vessel based on medieval baptismal fonts.

Other projects have investigated grief and historical memory. The performance “Drawing Lethe” (2006), for New York’s Winter Garden, commemorated those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. “Shrouds — Caluny” (2012) centers on a largely forgotten World War II forced labor camp, in what is now the Polish city of Zielona Góra. The ongoing series “Nirbhaya” (2015-present) investigates gendered violence and the power of lament.

“In my work, the act of remembering — or unforgetting, as I call it — is very important,” Weiss said. “I don’t have a remedy. I’m an artist and a composer, not a politician or activist. But so much of what one makes as an artist comes in response to trauma.

“The idea is not to retraumatize the audience,” she added. “It’s about finding a way out.”

As with many of Weiss’ projects, the “Metamorphosis” cycle encompasses a range of media: music, video and sound recording but also drawing, sculpture, choreography and live performance. In 2021, Weiss created her first “Metamorphosis (Sound Sculpture)” as a commission for the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, a state museum. It is now in the permanent collection.

Like that sister piece, the St. Louis installation comprises two cast metal columns, each weighing several hundred pounds and situated a few yards apart. Approached through the forest, their rusty patina and trunk-like diameter blend into the surrounding wood. But as one grows closer, the scale seems to shift. The columns become more imposing and somehow more human.

“Symbolically, they evoke a tree trunk or an ancient column,” Weiss said. “I also would like them to be understood as creatures or presences. They are standing there, witnessing us, listening to the park, listening to the forest.”

Located near the top of each column, almost like a face, is a visor-like grate that protects a powerful ambisonic speaker capable of broadcasting in 360 degrees. Five times each day, music fills the wood, seemingly from all directions.

To create the first four movements, Weiss digitally recomposed versions of her initial piano improvisations. The fifth movement adds an eight-voice chorus. The sixth and final movement, written specifically for Laumeier, features St. Louis soprano Katie Beyers and mezzo soprano Ingrid Piazza.

Together, the six movements last around 35 minutes. Weiss spent months tailoring the recordings, sculpting how the sound weaves back and forth. The vocal tracks are clear and operatic but also ghostly and abstract — voices without words. The percussion is the sound of Weiss herself striking the columns barehanded.

“It sounds like ancient drums, or like rain, or like fire,” Weiss said. “But in ‘Metamorphosis,’ the most expressive instrument is the human voice. Suddenly, in the last movement, the column has become a woman again.

“This cycle of work is very much about beauty,” Weiss continued. “It’s about uncanny universes of sound and forest and landscape. It’s about escaping from what’s wrong with the world and into what could be.

“Many people touch the piece,” Weiss concluded. “They hold it like a friend.”