During the research, we came across various traditions of kite and wind music around the globe and learnt that the kite flute tradition is particularly vibrant in Vietnam. We were curious how come this tradition survives despite the abundance of other readily available entertainment sorts, what is the beauty of this practice, how it was traditionally celebrated with ceremony and competition, the aesthetic and the artistic values embedded within it, and how it evolves in the modern world.
We decided to make the kite and the kite flute ourselves to understand and learn to appreciate this tradition and practice.
We tried out several materials that are available in Austria. It was not easy to find big enough bamboo to make kite bigger than 1,5 meter. We wanted to start right away with an assembled kite instead of a traditional sew-on kite because we envisage bringing this project to many different places in the world, so the kite should be as portable as possible while being big enough to carry at least 3 kite flutes.
Our first 1m blue kite was not a success, but we learnt a lot from it and applied the improvements on the next 1,5 pink kite. We could not believe that we made it as it soared effortlessly at the first test flight. Now we understand the satisfaction and fascination of those who practise this tradition.
Now that the kite can fly, we ventured onto making flute which is certainly the harder part, especially the mouth piece of the flute is an intricate design that requires precision and know-how. Again it was not possible to find smaller bamboos that are still not cracked by the dryness of the European air, so we decided to use PVC tubes and scraped the surface to thin out and make them lighter.
After several attempts we finally succeeded in making good sounding flutes. However we faced another challenge. The wind is certainly not the best friend of microphone. We had to find a solution to reduce wind noise in order to record the flute sounds on the fly. We also had to consider which aesthetics should the audio recording manifests. Furthermore, we posed ourselves questions what makes this project with kite flute artistic, whether the kite flute is an artistic medium or it is the subject matter or may be both depends on each forms of presentation…
We could carry on this research during the residency in Crexida Anima Fluo in Bologna in August 2024.
Siedl/Cao 