Memories in Music Outdoor Parcours Trail

Sound Parcours

Ten varied audio-visual installations and live performances by musicians are being staged on a trail in the many niches of the outdoor space of the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg.

Audio-visual installations and live performances

Avant Joik combines two fundamentally different ways of working with, thinking and imagining voice. For the Sámi Katarina Barruk images, stories and feelings are the starting point for her evocative joik improvisations. Maja S. K. Ratkje’s experimental vocal performances, on the other hand, are created in awareness of the voice’s versatility. Avant Joik will be presented in a new film version with the Sámi video artist Matti Aikio.

Station 2 | Leichhardt in Australien

The 19th-century expeditions of the Brandenburg scientist Ludwig Leichhardt along with colonial settlement projects have left deep scars in the north of Australia inhabited by indigenous communities. The two world premieres by Kirsten Reese and Erkki Veltheim (with Daniel Wilfred) for Ensemble Adapter are dedicated to the varied encounters between indigenous and Western knowledge systems, cultures and ways of life, the reappraisal of colonial structures and making indigenous culture visible. The livestreamed concert echoes in the trail.

Station 3 | Unearth

In a live multi-disciplinary crossfade of experiential worlds, involving mechanical instruments, costumes, video images evoking nature, drums, guitar, movement and mise en scène, drummer Tony Buck creates a scenario in Unearth in which he ritually brings together excavations of his practice as an artist: live (7–9 May 2021).

Station 4 + 7 + 10 | Brasilien – Europa

The festival introduces Guilherme Vaz and Walter Smetak, the two central figures of the first generation of Brazilian sound art at the interface of European and indigenous aesthetics. Smetak’s mainly graphic and colourful scores, including Anestesia from 1971, interpreted here as a film score, are influenced by various cultural and spiritual practices in Bahia, as are his Plásticas Sonoras. Sinfonia dos ares is one of Vaz’s “longdurational” studio compositions, marked by over 20 years of close contact with indigenous sonorities in western Brazil, presented at the Akademie as an installation with mechanically operated indigenous maracas. Thomas Kessler’s compositional idea of placing two different musical traditions in an equal-status sound dialogue using live electronics dates back to the 1970s. An audio-visual version with Western instruments and instruments invented by Smetak, whose cosmos Kessler became acquainted with at the end of the 1990s, will be heard, played by musicians of the Ensemble Modern and Silvia Ocougne, who will also play some of the Smetak instruments on display live (8 – 9 May 2021 in the afternoon).

Station 4 | Thomas Kessler, Dialoge (1977, 2021 world premiere)
Station 7 | Walter Smetak, Anestesia (1971)
Station10 | Guilherme Vaz, Sinfonia dos Ares (2002)

Station 5 | Doppelbelichtung

As in a photographic double exposure, two realities merge into one: in her concert installation, Carola Bauckholt instrumentally imitates natural sounds deeply rooted in memory. Specific bird calls are transmitted to violins hanging in a large tree, to which the violinist Karin Hellqvist enters from time to time on 7 and 8 May 2021 into a live dialogue in which the violins are indistinguishable from birdsong.

Station 6 | Oase Siwa – Kärwa

The miniature Ga’s is part of the unfinished Insel Musik project that set out to illustrate the multiversal and universal nature-based and man-made island cultures. On headphones, Ga’s can be heard alternating with Zimmermann’s Franconian Kärwa Melodien (1979) from the Lokale Musik cycle.

Station 8 | Naturvölker

Using four themes – myths of creation, invasion / migration, technology and incarnation – the Bolivian composer Carlos Gutierrez explores the relationship between so-called civilised and primitive societies in sound, text and movement. In live interventions, the audio-visual installation by the Bolivian chamber ensemble of the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (ECOEIN) occasionally meets the real-time musicians Ute Wassermann and Sabine Vogel, the musician Jorge Villaseca and the dancer Sharon Mercado (7 – 8 May 2021).

Station 9 | Life is Impossible without Forgetting

The electronic musician and electric bass player Tony Elieh sees in forgetting a chance to escape Beirut, the Lebanese city repeatedly exposed to destruction. In his sound installation, he takes as his starting point the jingle announcing the news broadcasts in the Christian eastern part of Beirut during the civil war (1975 – 1990), reconstructed as the sum of acoustic memories in his circle of friends.

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