Site-specific sound installations
Ü-Musik (2022)
a sonic ode to the U-Bahn multiverse - 20 minutes
in collaboration with Malte Graefe and Elias Mattler
Imagine that at that moment, you had just stepped into another coach or taken one train later. (How) could that seemingly thoughtless action have influenced your life?
In March 2022, I was part of a trio exposition at Studio45 in Hamburg that celebrated the U3 metro line. For this exhibition, I collaborated with the photo duo Graefe-Mattler to create a coherent body of work in which audio and pictures pay tribute to the passengers of the U3. The U3 is a circular line that passes many important places in Hamburg and transports people from all parts of society.
During their photographic experiments, Graefe-Mattler decided to exhibit a human-interest series with moments captured in the stations of the popular subway line. This also became my source of inspiration.
In the weeks following, I became a regular U3 rider, just sitting in the train and observing the environment inside and outside the vehicles. I encountered many weird, funny, and inspiring sounds and melted the impressions of those various rides into a four-speaker installation that portrays the similarities and differences of my U-Bahn rides. The (a)synchronous occurrences of doors closing, rails screeching, and distant conversations became a transportive soundscape that accompanied the exhibited pictures. Ü-Musik depicts how different every ride can be and that it is always a mystery what will happen behind the doors that you choose to enter for your ride.
Photo: E. Mattler
Photo: M. Graefe
Überfluss (2022)
quadrophonic speaker installation - 2'30 minutes
Überfluss attempts to sonically capture and display the flooding of the Elbe that happened in Lauenburg between 1855 and 2013. When I arrived in Lauenburg, I noticed that the floods were a burning topic for the citizens of the Elbstraße, who lived next to the water. Inspired by the ceramic work Hochwasserpegel by Karin Scherling – which can be seen on the riverside not far from the Künstlerhaus – I wanted to explore how I could capture this topic in an audio installation.
I decided to use the data collection of the local water levels and map them sonically, scaled in time and intensity, in order to provide visitors with a complementary form of data display. In a time span of only a couple of minutes, a peaceful city soundscape is disrupted by the sound of waves breaking through the room, their respective impact based on the existing data.
Überfluss was presented on June 5th, 2022, in Lauenburg as part of the opening concert and exhibition for the new fellows of the Künstlerhaus/Stadtgalerie Lauenburg. Many thanks to the Künstlerhaus Lauenburg/Elbe e.V. for providing me with the framework to do this work and to the Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsamt Elbe for sharing with me the data of the water levels from 1894–2021 captured at the surrounding measuring stations.
