At the end of 2013, a generous grant from the SK-Stiftung Kultur was awarded to the Chambers of Space Inquiries. The last building of the composition series for six vacant architectures was to be acquired, acoustically researched and presented as a building-sound composition in Cologne.
The foundation's support enabled the series to be completed and a comprehensive exhibition of all previous buildings to be held by the end of 2014. Since the original concept of the composition series had begun in Cologne, it seemed certain from the outset that finding vacancies in Cologne would not be a major problem.
In the inner city area, parts of many streets have stood, and continue to stand empty, for years. However, the vacancy enquiries beginning in January 2014 presented the Chambers for Space Inquiries with unprecedented difficulties in all these years: despite good networking in the cultural life of the city, week-long site visits, recommendations, presentations and more than 30 official inquiries at various city offices, real estate companies, law firms and private developers, as well as political parties, there were consistently only rejections or no answers at all. And although there were always short-term glimmers of hope, the project ended without a building. We literally stood in front of closed doors to an endless list of empty buildings.
We were forced to ask the SK Foundation to extend the compliance period until October 2015. This was granted to us under certain conditions. At the same time, however, we were aware that our own resources and research would not produce any further results. The Chambers for Space Inquiries had failed with the project in Cologne. Something like this had never happened before and was unthinkable against the background of years of experience.
From spring 2015, the Cologne curator and artist Georg Dietzler took over the building search. His contacts to several owners of vacant buildings had remained closed to us until then. But even here, one seemed to be interested, if at all, only in short-term media-effective events and installations. When in September 2015 a contact with the international real estate company bpd gave us the opportunity to take over a complete building complex in Severinstrasse for several weeks, we could hardly believe it at first. However, together with Georg Dietzler, we organised equipment, insurance, working and travel times, as well as the opening panel and press within a few days, even before the binding commitment had been made.
On 31.09.2018 we delivered the equipment that the Atelier Sound Research in Würzburg made available to us and after the rather casual handing over of the keys I immediately started the inspection.
{ FROM THE PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT 2015 }
»Where formerly the historic Cologne city archive was situated, today we look into a deep, black crater of lost archived memories. Directly ‘next door’ we enter the building 214-218 Severinstrasse, a vacant former office building that is planned to be replaced with a new exclusive apartment block containing shops at ground floor. But nothing can be done before the circumstances of the collapse of the Cologne city archive has been forensically clarified. Two buildings bonded by fate, a historic loss, human failure, a crime that will probably never be solved.
Legions of office cabinets, conference tables, desks, used glasses, latte macchiato coffee cups, pens, papers, files and a news paper articles on the collapse of the city archive next door form the remains of former utilizations of the office building. We also find traces of the temporary architect’s bureau that was commissioned with the protection of the collapse side of the city archive.
On three vast floors with over 40 rooms, connected by a reverberant system of staircases and tubes, sounds are stored in the body of the architecture, manifesting memories of the past. Office situations appear as sounding sculptures, suddenly, blurring, abruptly disappearing or fading into another sound in another room, guiding the listener into another spatio-sonic constellation. Stories are being told by listening.
A space does not simply exist in isolation, but can only be understood in relation to something else – movement, objects inside and outside of “it”. A space does not simply consist of four walls, a floor and ceiling; its full dimension does not unfold without one walking into it – it is the human experience that makes it what it is. And this experience is one expressed through time, through a convergence with careful observation – the auditory sense.
A spatial sound-composition as the last tenant of the building.«
Premiere: 23.09.2015
Opening with podium discussion about temporary cultural utilisation of vacant buildings and sonic architectures in every day life with Frau Dr. Könches, Kunststiftung NRW / Tanja Kilger, bpd Immobilienentwicklung GmbH / Daniel Mennicken, ON – Neue Musik Köln e.V. / Gerriet K. Sharma, sound artist and composer / Georg Dietzler, artist and curator / Mischa Kuball, artist & Prof. media art at Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
{...}
{...}
In building-sound compositions, permanently unique spatial sequences are created on the basis of functional (architectural) settings, spatial concepts as anti-dedication. The broken, dysfunctional but REAL architectural concept reinforces the desire for an impressive experience by creating one or more, partly interlinked spatial impressions.
{ THE BUILDING AS A LISTENING MODE INCUBATOR }
The installations, the shut-down machines, the views through glass and corridor systems, near and far, wide and narrow, empty and filled - everything floats, there are no more regularities in the architecture left behind, in the discarded use. These rooms require different listening modes or promote alternation between listening, hearing and eavesdropping.
These leaps and constant relocations are supported by the arrangement of the loudspeakers and the spatial sound arrangements. Loudspeakers are partly hidden, partly clearly visible, sometimes both in one room - constantly creating irregular questions, restlessness in a state of silence, trust in the availability of a moment without disposition.
»[…] the very first thing we usually try is to identify the sound source and to generate a mental model about what interaction could have happened to cause the sound. At the same time, we identify the relative location of the sound source and are possibly concerned with an appropriate reaction. People who are asked to tell what they hear frequently use a description of an imagined sound source or process and only rarely a characterization of acoustic properties as they are addressed in musical listening.
Everyday listening is performed permanently without directing any effort to the listening process.« [Hermmann/Ritter]
Artificial sounds recorded on location and elsewhere, as well as sounds transmitted between rooms, alternate irregularly in the maze of the entire spatial system, merge the architecture with moments of excitement, draw attention to themselves in order to lose them again, resulting in concatenations and changes of listening modes.
Listening to one's own hearing as an aesthetic strategy of individualization.
In the basement, just before the cafeteria, on the left there is a wooden door that can only be moved with difficulty in its hinges. The squeaking is deafening and modulates with the movement of the door.
THIS DOOR, gets a designed sign and is branded as a 'space-sound instrument'. Those who try out the instrument can listen to the glissandi of the door through the entire spatial network of the basement and its spread in the stairwell, multiplying it monophonously, spatio-temporally.
Whether this is part of the composition or not is no longer important. It is the invitation to squeak audibly from afar with a door. After weeks of exhausting work in the building, this seems a meaningful metaphor for a composition that is no longer afraid of any setting, staging or interpretation.
And if you leave the building, you can find the sounds that have just been woven into the building, in the city, in the tram, in the café, perhaps at home. Once activated, the perception remains individually changed for a moment and composes its own sound space from its environment.
»What I have always found the most fascinating is the experience of having the expanded awareness facilitated by technological intervention influence perception later under more normal circumstances. The expanded awareness of studio manipulation often carries over into soundscape awareness when similar sounds are heard later.« [B. Truax]
A glance at the floor plans of the four floors of the former office building at 214-218 Severinstrasse immediately reveals the hopelessness of an overview, the impossibility of an objective point of view, a perspective on the ensemble as a whole. After five previous building sound compositions, a complexity had been reached for which one cannot prepare oneself. The four methods of building sound composition:
1. Inclusion of acoustic conditions and use of site-specific sounds.
2. Modification of site-specific sounds.
3. Spatialization of sounds in the building.
4. Complete rejection of acoustic conditions and site-specific sounds.
These are applicable to every building and every architectural spatial constellation, but the charging by the phantom of the collapsed building, the complexity of the sound distribution in such a spatial system, the permanently changing ambient noises by the construction site, the busy Severinstrasse, the school on the opposite side and the passers-by on the side of the building, all these were factors that could no longer be abstracted or recorded.
What was needed was a strategy of losing yourself, an exact plan for navigating in the foreign, and a composed curiosity for what can be found, an intellectual confrontation with subjective experience, with what cannot be grasped, and a practice of reacting to these experiences. That was the aim of the last building sound composition of the series {kA} : Oblivious to Gravity.
Losing
oneself
to find
or to
experience
something (not just anything).
And in every moment it's about the assertion of the same through a setting, for which at the beginning the artist is responsible, but then less and less, because the building and its surroundings take over, and from an individual point in time and space the visitor alone bears the responsibility or just wants to go home.
And one has to ask oneself again: What is this all about?
There is again something unspeakable behind the concepts and strategies of space exploration that seem to peter out in the void.
For the space-creating artist, it is all about one thing:
Enduring - the discomfort. But what is the orientation in the thicket of genre PR and interpretive sovereignty of the media? As already indicated, it can only be a deductive approach that, if it wants to adhere to a concept of composing as a 'conscious continuation', dedicates itself to a methodical exploration of the subjective.
And there is the question of how one can create space out of material and thereby create presence. And not simply creating attention (slogan!). Today the latter are always inevitably preformed by the media and the expectations behind them want to, no - must be 'fulfilled'.
{ HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF THE LATEST CULTURAL PR }
»Attack the Future!« - Darmstadt Summer Courses
»Reporting from the Front« - Venice Architecture Biennale
Vacancy is a political issue, that's how much we've learned in the last 7 years. Vacancy is a product of circumstances that cannot be discussed. A wound, a sign of failure… .but above all the disclosure of economic practices, which would cause unbelievable amazement and rejection in everyday life… 'a bad image' or even critical questioning of the planned or the totally failed.
This is to be avoided always and with all means.
And nevertheless, or precisely because of that, these rooms are extraordinarily well suited for the composition and presentation of spatial music! Because the imprint of what music has to 'deliver' in the studio, on stage, from CD or in the concert hall has never been greater. The formats determine the content.
In places, however, where expectations directed at them have obviously not been fulfilled or even disappointed, non-spaces are opened so that they can be appropriated as personal spaces.
As part of the series of building-sound compositions, not only were loudspeakers installed at selected positions in the building in order to explore and incorporate the building as a sound body and reverberation chamber, but equally important were the preparations of passages such as windows and doors as well as the lighting design. Here it was crucial that no further installations or alterations were made. Only the lighting found was used.
On the basis of the sketches / floor plans I could get an overview of the spatial design. How a half-opened window or a wedged door changes the street sound or the sound propagation of the loudspeaker arrangements, can only be understood through experience with the various rooms and their structural conditions. Aural architecture still has no floor plan equivalents.
These passages can be used like filters in an analog sound generation chain and contribute significantly to the composition. Whether a room is illuminated and how strongly it is illuminated by the lamps installed there also plays an important role in how the scene is perceived when entering and also after a while of getting used to it. Opened or semi-closed blinds allow for an incidence of light which can support the sound. Lowered shutters visually isolate the room, usually also acoustically from the outside world. These found facilities are factors that became more and more important and concrete components of the composition possibilities on site during the time of the work in and with the buildings. The ground floor, the basement and the cellar are each equipped with their own computer-controlled multi-channel loudspeaker chains, which were installed in the respective room constellations.
The spatial-sound compositions had been developed from the different room situations and their interior-exterior soundscapes. The loudspeakers were partly hidden in the individual rooms, partly visible, sometimes both in one room.
Through the interlinking of sound-space leaps, the pauses, the recording of visual motifs in the acoustic abstraction - water pipes through which no longer any water flows are instrumentalized by white noise and a loudspeaker, so that pipes and disused facilities are acoustically 'revived' - and through the placement of chairs in the corridor system, one constantly generates an but irregular flow of questions: Is the loudspeaker switched on? Do I sit here "for free"? Why do I hear something in the next room and 'nothing' here? And then someone walks down the aisle and my own aural architecture crumbles, socially destroyed.Productive restlessness in a situation of rest, short-term trust in the availability of a moment without disposition - personal - not capable of consensus.
»[…] sound is considered a conversational element of space: it is ‘shaped’ by acoustical phenomena as well as it is produced by several actions and dynamics that occurs and forms space. « [Roça/Tramonato, p. 212]
The 1st floor, originally an office floor, was closed to the public. The glass doors to the stairwell were so acoustically permeable that sounds of steps, voices and doors from the building could be heard inside. All other doors on the floor and a window to the street were opened and only one microphone was placed in the chamber system. The microphone was in operation 24 hours a day. Depending on the time of day, distant street sounds penetrated through the tilted window from below. The microphone signal was 'mixed' into the arranged compositions of the lower floors.
The cable runs vertically through the test drill hole, which now marks all floors at the same place through a perforation. A live circuit of an only seemingly silent building, in which its materials work, into which at certain times of the day, certain sounds penetrate and reverberate in order to fade away. The transmission from the 1st floor was thus permanent, but also unpredictable, enveloping - disturbing, documentary - uncontrolled, conceptual - emotionless (little sensation, more perception, hardly affective), a "directionless" microphone produces space without sense for traditional spatial concepts, intentions, desires, hopes. Not even aleatoric concepts may claim this method.
Outside becomes inside, whenever and however and obviously without reference.
When we started working on the building-sound compositions with the Chambers in 2010, our idea of project documentation was naïve: it was clear that today in the art world every ephemeral project without documentation is treated as a non-project at the level of a draft or a mere project idea. Documentation is the proof and evidence that art has 'taken place' and thus serves the purpose of evaluability. However, documentation can also communicate a thought that runs through and develops through a project series over many years. In the context of {kA} :Oblivious to Gravity, elaborate microphones, the recording of audio and video sequences and photos were intended to "capture" the experiences of building-sound compositions and make the series of works comprehensible afterward.
It was not yet clear to us that the effort would at times mean completely independent work with very sensitive requirements. We were not aware of the impossibility of generalizing the personal and the processual in a documentary way, or of the danger of completely missing the core of the work through the documentary and thus harming the entire work more than supporting it.
Within the framework of Oblivious to Gravity, the documentation of the six buildings developed into the second stage of the artistic work, into an independent synthesized extract.
The fact that the finalisation of the documentation after completion of the compositions took place in stages and over months, sometimes years, also played a role.
In view of the proximity to the collapse site of the Cologne City Archive, the question of documentation is posed quite differently anew: The impossibility of documentation opens up the chance of a reflection of what is possible in terms of mediation and the desire to be able to document anything. This desire directly and exemplarily addresses the desperation of the individual in a cultural community, not to disappear, not to be able to record what has been created, to be able to give lasting testimony in one place. The hubris of immortality, at least in the form of a document, is deeply human, promotes excuses and motivations (larger archives, different archiving methods, higher budgets, etc.), and provokes attempts at explanation beyond what is feasible.
In art, the insurmountable is overcome (common: time and space in film or in concert), seemingly desperate entities become a third party, a whole. For a moment, the force of gravity is medially abolished, someone moves without a body with or in other bodies.
But the archive has many limitations.
In this respect, the collapse of the Cologne City Archive is not simply an incomprehensible scandal. Above all, it seems scandalous that our cultural 'machinations' or 'achievements', idealisations of an otherwise unsustainable situation of conflict potentials through the centuries, are simply not 'sustainable', neither culturally, nor physically, factually, institutionally. It's impossible for us to accept that.
Our cultural community: Constant progress - perhaps, - constant despair - indeed.
Among other things, this can be seen in the impossibility of their documentation. It is »The tear in basic trust« (Gunther Geltinger on 28 May 2015 at 10:29, Zeit-online) that has come to light, which we must cover-up by all means in the constitution of our society, the utopia of a cultural preservation, a preservability of the 'here and now'.
While working in the building 214-218 Severinstraße, passing by the measuring instruments for vibrations and temperature fluctuations in the basement, I understand that the many artefacts that were criminally snatched from generations of a cultural society were never created to survive "their time" so far and that we have long since reached our limits in all our efforts to make the experiences and manifested knowledge available to later generations. The digital recording, whether in image or sound, is at best a lifeboat, but not all can be saved. And not all artefacts can be 'recorded' digitally at all.
The tear goes much further and deeper. If we could imagine that the daily loss of diversity and cultural wealth is greater than any amount of storage space that can actually be created for it, or even - I speculate - greater than what is created on the same day, then perhaps the city archive would still stand. Then the value estimation of the artefacts would have been different.
Another thought occurs to me that the city archive might not have collapsed if we had not relied on continuous availability: availability of information, availability of knowledge, availability of political continuity, economic diligence, and philosophical integrity. A necessary trust that has literally broken the ground under its feet. As I speculate, the facts of this decline affect “my” building, the neighborhood, and the cultural community of this city. In the maze of these corridors and the layers of these floors, you can hear that.
So what do we want from „{kA}: Oblivious to Gravity" after the work has been completed, the audience has been swept through the corridors in groups, the press and sponsors have been led through and audio recordings have been made in endless sessions, what do we want to archive and what for - and how?
The 'in retrospect' builds on a distance and forces a renewed approach to what is actually incomprehensible. One tries to remember how this came about, the search. To ask who we actually interviewed so that it could happen and we come across an incomplete list.
I remember the endless walks with recording devices, the long sitting in the individual rooms, chambers, and corridors, the pictures and stories that irresistibly appear when one passes by the left-over cupboards, tables, desks, a gigantic safe, the technical measuring devices for the collapsed site, copiers, telephone systems. There are shadows of people entering and leaving the cafeteria and terrace every day, the post office, and the underground heating plant. I remember the circular borehole that had been drilled through all the abandoned floors in the same place. About 20 cm in diameter. The undocumentable - as a yardstick - the disappearance of the documentation - next door.
We comment on the fear of disappearance or the suspicion of never having been there, on the basis of documents that are available in the process of searching.
That is all.
