Bern, Switzerland
Mission Title: Soundscapes - Max Neuhaus in Switzerland
Mission Author: Rolling Stone Italia Magazine
Mission By: Massimiliano Ferramondo, Emiliano Audisio
Mission Finished on Date: 04-07-2008
SCRIPT
- Drive to Bern and visit both Neuhaus' Suspended Sound Line piece at the GIBB Campus and the one at the Swisscom center. Approach the installations highlighting differences in the outer contexts, before you explore them. How does sound integrate in different environments?
- Get to Geneva and check out the Promenade du pin piece. Show how does an artificial sound fit in a natural location and any reactions of the people passing by the installation. Does the sound installation act anything like a community maker?
- Go to Saint
- Luc and ask for the La Barma path, then follow it. What's the effect on the walking experience when affected both in time and space by sound? For each piece you view make sure to record on tape the gradual approaching to it and the prolonged effects on the locations themselves, both in people and perception.
- Frame your involvement creatively, as a voyage, a trip, talk to the camera or don't. Present your research however literally or poetically you see fit, just don't forget to tell a story through sounds, images, or commentary.
TRAVEL BAG
What does traveling through soundscapes feel like?
When not thinking about it, we often forget how much depth does sound give to our everyday experience. Sound is not only articulating in time through a more or less regular rhythm, it also displays across space stretching its different grains all around us. John Cage made us aware of sounds, Karlheinz Stockhausen put some order in their universe and Max Neuhaus finally turned them into contemporary art. No matter how crazy or unmusical they might seem, sound installations expanded the art language to ampler, subtler, immaterial grounds.
Neuhaus' poetic is about creating community at least as much as it is about timber and acoustic texturing of space, while his refined ear has even been lent to provide a more human set of sounds to emergency vehicles. Switzerland features some very interesting pieces from the artist's last decade of activity, permanent installations owned by local collectors or institutions. To take a trip from Bern to Saint-Luc might be a good chance to check them out and experience the sensuality of different soundscapes.
Mission Report
Since our professional life deals with the world of the sound (and specifically with music), so we thought the our most interesting contribution to Check-in Architecture project was to explore the pieces by the artist who tried more than anyone else to reaffirm the centrality of listening inside space redefinition. Came back from our mission in Switzerland, we are quite satisfied we had the chance to offer, through our documentary, a “visual voice” to Max Neuhaus’ work. The biggest difficulty we had was the impossibility of shooting the practical side of this experience. As the artist strongly reclaimed, “Sound Works” live only in the space and time they’ve been conceived (so much so that sounds that compose the pieces are deliberately and technically unrecordable) and in the perceptive helpfulness of who goes “through” them. It’s because of this “handicap of the eye” that in front of Neuhaus’ work we could and we would offer “just” a personal witness (ours and of people we met during the mission) of the three works settled in Bern, Geneva and Saint-Luc.
Massimiliano Ferramondo, Emiliano Audisio
