Yomayra Puentes-Rivera: Intervention Public Space

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.

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.

Iva Kirova, Andres Londoño,

Angela Parslow, Yomayra Puentes-Rivera,

Luisa Roa & Haiyue Tao

This small intervention, based in the city of Leipzig, was a collaboration between six artists from diverse cultural backgrounds. Being new to Germany (in particular eastern Germany) we used it as an opportunity to demonstrate the collision of own cultural identities with the city of Leipzig.

The piece was comprised of six individually A6 postcards that functioned like a souvenir. These self-made cards featured political quotes from our home countries (Bulgaria, Colombia, China and UK) that were then roughly translated with Google Translate into German and displayed on a typical retailer’s postcard stand on Augustusplatz (located at the east end of the city centre).

Dealing with the ephemerality of meaning we question how does the passing of time affects reception and interpretation. The result was an almost incomprehensible display of political and contextual absurdity that emulated our own sense of cultural displacement.

The A6 postcards.

° Andrés Londoño (Colombia) designed his postcard based on the words pronounced by the Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega in an interview, after coordinated a military action between 6 and 7 November 1985, when the M-19 guerilla made an armed assault on the Palace of Justice of Colombia.
His words were: "Maintaining the master democracy, here they are not going to frighten us or to attack any of the powers or against any of the branches of the public power, at this moment this is an attack on the jurisdictional branch and that must be made very clear;" "That the army is in a position to keep all branches of public power functioning because this is a democracy and for that we are, to make it respected."

° Between 1990 and 1994 Jaime Garzón (a Journalist, lawyer, peace activist and political satirist) worked at the Casa de Nariño, the Presidential House of Colombia, he helped in the translations of the new Colombian Constitution of 1991 into the indigenous languages and as a presidential adviser in communications.
Yomayra Puentes-Rivera (Colombia) designed her postcard based on the translation of the indigenous Wayúu del Article 12 of the Colombian Constitution compiled by Jaime Garzón, which reads: Articulo 12: “Nadie podrá ser sometido a pena cruel, trato inhumano o desaparición forzada.”

Translation of the indigenous:

Piece ten Two: "No one will be able to carry above his heart to anyone, or make him ill in his person even though he thinks and says differently."

° Luisa Roa (Colombia) designed her postcard based on the translation of one sentence in the speech of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán a candidate in 1946 for the presidential elections in Colombia.

"Ellos quieren tener un país paria e imbécil, que trabaje para sus intereses…"