piątek, 20 lutego 2015

BILDUNG | "Majątek" Exhibition




















Sound essay "Bildung" will be premiered as a sound installation at the opening of the exhibition "Majątek"

Królikarnia, Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Warsaw

15/03/2015, 18.00

Michał Libera - recordings, montage

Ralf Meinz - recordings, sound design
Tony di Napoli - performance on litophones


Curated collectively under direction of Agnieszka Tarasiuk
The team: Katarzyna Kucharska-Hornung, Karolina Puchała-Rojek, Krzysztof Pijarski, Jan Sowa, Michał Libera

One of the two features of "Majątek" exhibition is an extraordinary collection of sculptures developed by von Rose family in 1930-ies, in a small town of Eastern Prussia called Döhlau (now: Dylewo). Consisting mainly of Adolfo Wildt marbles, it was violently put to an end during World War II when the property was demolished and ruined. Sculptures remained underground for over 50 years until excavations by an archeological crew directed by Tomasz Mikocki were undertaken. What then became the collection of National Museum in Warsaw are sculptures distorted and disintegrated. Due to chemical processes some of them were turned into "sand" while others gained new colors and shapes. Most of the items seem nothing but random stones, others - oddments of once great pieces of art.

Looking at them - whether you call them stones, sculptures or remains just doesn't matter - the history seems at the same time continuing and mute. No recordings have survived WWII. More than that - it is barely possible that any of them had ever existed. We don't know the local soundscape of 1930-ies, past voices of the inhabitants are inevitably gone - everything there was to hear back then got disintegrated immediately, incomparably faster than the disintegration of the stones which proceeds until now.

It is disintegration where the voice and the stones meet at the same time becoming the topic of sound essay. "Bildung" consists exclusively of recordings of today's Döhlau remains, marble from "cave di marmo" in Carrara used by Adolfo Wildt, sculptures from "Majątek" exhibition and limestone of one of the first stone instruments ever - litophone. They are all brought together with the voice of Sibylle Friedberg, von Rose family descendent who is recollecting her past memories and reading fragments of philosophical texts. One of them comes from Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgement" which also delivered the essay's title. It is not easy to translate it in a word. "Bildung" means education in a sense originating from its Enlightenment axioms; it means shaping and integrity. It also means formation, not excluding its chemical connotation. All the meanings were of importance to Kant when he attempted to clear out his vision of art referring to salt crystallization. All of them are also fundamental for the exhibition bringing together art, historical fall of a social formation and disintegration of stone.