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press: A Summer Solstice Sojourn to Danh Võ's Studio

From behind colossal sunglasses, Chantal Crousel, Võ’s dealer, iPhone-tracked the crates of champagne she’d had sent. The sound artist Tarek Atoui, resident guest-of-honour, darted about indefatigably, tweaking elaborate instruments he’d constructed speculatively from drawings of extinct ones and installed – along with human operators, amplifiers, mixers and so on – amidst the plants, sculptures and buildings, generating frequencies and dominants and tonics from which dance students from Salzburg took their cue, pirouetting and gyrating on the upper floors of barns, on paths, among giant piled-up slabs of marble. No less elaborate than the instruments’ pipes and tubes was the system of sprinklers running about the property to irrigate the planting rows and flower beds.

‘This is an East-German device,’ Võ explained as we passed one whose spray was generating a remarkably clear rainbow, which a succession of entranced guests were Instagramming. ‘It pumps at a perfectly consistent pressure. No one’s bettered it.’