Sound Installation
in situ
2014
They are not cut yet but their luck is already sentenced.
About 60 trees leave their home in the north wing of the Weimarhallenpark to make room for the new residence of the Neues Bauhaus-Museum.
Birds, bats, banks and the others trees will say goodbye to this group of future outcasts.
adieu
is an interactive sound-installation that wants to offer the
opportunity to Weimarers and other habitants of the city that usually
dwell this park to join this mourning’s chorus and begin to say goodbye
to the each other. If the plan is accurate, only five trees located on the other side of the road will survive in its current position and they will be the witnesses of the announced arrival of the new neighbour of 30 meters.
Weimar
in Germany has currently nine big parks and the Weimarhallenpark is the
only one in the centre of the city. This park was and is a very popular
venue for adults and children.
On the other hand Weimar is very well know for be the first quarter of Bauhaus, the school of art founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. Since 1995 a temporary building houses the Bauhaus Museum Weimar that shows a small part of the collection that represent the architectural style of Bauhaus.
Around
2008 the city began planning the construction of a new Bauhaus Museum
to replace the existing today, which is too small to host the complete
actual collection.
After a huge competition and the redesign of the district planning law the winner was chose in 2012.
Around
April 2014 Mr. Röhrich an inhabitant of the city, who grew up and has
lived most of his life in the surroundings of the Weimarhallenpark area,
contact me with the aim to create a strategy that allowed him to make
duel with his memories an the new changes.
The
construction of the Neues Bauhaus Museum will remove Mr. Rörich’s
preferred wood bench in the Weimarhallenpark as well as the sixty trees
that are behind of it. When we began to talk bout his feeling was clear that the result of our actions would be therapeutic art.
The
first strategy was to visit the park regularly every Sunday between 11
and 14 hrs. In those sessions, we interviewed locals about their
memories in the park as well as their opinion about the site chosen to
the construction of the new museum.
I
taught to Mr. Röhrich how to manage a Blog and between April and May
2014 he wrote the texts and I was in charge to the sound recordings. The
title chosen by him was: Bauhaus oder Hausbau?.
On this process I noticed how the opinions about the places were more frequent than the memories of the place, also because many of the interviewees not grew in Weimar, they arrived in the city after.
Despite the difficulties was possible to collect some of the recollections and create an album, named Bürger zum Weimarhallenpark.
On this process I noticed how the opinions about the places were more frequent than the memories of the place, also because many of the interviewees not grew in Weimar, they arrived in the city after.
Despite the difficulties was possible to collect some of the recollections and create an album, named Bürger zum Weimarhallenpark.
Our fieldwork led me to a few
insights that have implications for design an interactive installation
and the potential ways of using sound in public spaces and creates an
intersection between memory and time.
As
the future of the trees is that they will be cut in the autumn of 2014 I
choose the Sunday 28 of September as the day to install the piece.
adieu consisted in nine audio tracks of branches being cut with mowers an the sound of trees falling on the grass.
The
original idea consisted that at different distances, different audios
will be activated with the pass of the pedestrians, but the constant
overlapping of tracks showed that it was better to use a single composed
track.
The
audios were reproduced in the site, and a red and white construction
tape was installed around the area of the trees that will be cut,
pretended to foresee the future outlook of the area and evoke in the
citizens a spirit of solidarity with the trees as well as a moment of
mourning and farewell.
Also I provided some yellow labels where people could write messages and leave them hanging in the trees.
Technical Aspects:
To
the Audio Installation I used one board of Arduino Duemilanove with a
WaveAudio Shield, the use of the Arduino AF_Wave library and a SD card,
nine uncompressed 22KHz, 12 bit, mono Wave (.wav) and a pair of head
speakers, also a PING))) Ultrasonic Distance Sensor.
For the Audio edition I use the programs Cubase LE AI Elements 6 and Audacity.