52°19’43”N 4°53’34”E

From the 4th of January until the 25th of January Henk Schut exhibits his installation at Het Glazen Huis, Amstelpark.

In a world increasingly entangled in crises and ecological disruption, this work explores new sonic orientations and hidden resonances. It invites attonement to the subtle, the overlooked, and the unheard.
The installation unfolds as a unique sound and spatial experience, in which the horizontal dynamics of ecological perception become tangible—a field where the human, the non-human and the inorganic meet and resonate.

Entitled 52°19’43’“N 4°53’34”’E—the coordinates of The Glass House—the installation provides access to the sounds that inconspicuously shape our everyday reality (the immediate surroundings of Glazen Huis). However, these are sounds that we cannot normally hear.Sound—both perception and physical force—reveals connections, stories, and transformations between landscapes, histories, and species.

Resonance and vibration become an alternative language for coexistence.Small vibration motors (Exciters) set the glass walls in motion, causing the house itself to sing: the structure becomes a listening body, an ear that resonates with the landscape.Sounds hidden deep within the earth, and sounds beyond the range of human hearing—such as the bat colony beneath the nearby A10 motorway—are slowed down and made audible.

Attention shifts to frequencies and vibrations that normally escape our perception, and now surround us in a continuously evolving composition.Various environmental measurements (live and connected to our software) around The Glass House influence the volume and direction of the sound, creating a responsive acoustic field.

Image credit: Henk Schut

At 52°19’43’“N 4°53’34”’E, the focus shifts radically—from looking to listening deeply. Subtle sounds come to the fore: vibrations from the earth, the resonances of roots and fungi, the buzzing of micro-organisms that form a hidden ecology.
Sixty audio channels are distributed across the glass structure, transforming the space itself into a listening instrument. The sound forms a sculptural environment through which visitors can move freely, becoming part of a constantly changing acoustic landscape.
The software that tunes the sound and distributes it spatially is based on live measurements of the local soil, derived from open-source datasets from the Amstelpark combined with daily atmospheric information from the nearest measuring points.