To hear on Sunday 20 and 27 December 2015, 2pm - 9pm:
Sprachgerüste, Sprachgelüste
(2015, Premiere)
by Laura Mello (Germany)
Loudspeaker installations: Knut Remond / ohrenhoch
Laura Mello on 'Sprachgerüste, Sprachgelüste':
"Meaning, undivided, impenetrable, unnamable, would however be posited in the distance like a mirage, making the vocal exercise into a double landscape, furnished with a "background"; but instead of the music of the phonemes being the "background" of our messages (as happens in our poetry), meaning would now be the vanishing point of delectation." (Roland Barthes in 'The Rustle of Language', transl. by Richard Howard, orig. Das Rauschen der Sprache, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2005)
How do we listen to language, what do we perceive before we understand the sense of the words?
The spoken German language is disassembled in its sonic qualities, and will be spread in the spaces of the Soundgallery ohrenhoch. At the entrance, a framework of melodic-rhythmical patterns; in the Audio Booth, consonants; in the cellar, extremely slowed vowels.
Between these spaces each visitor is offered a distinct perception of the sound of language, as a suggestion, as a shadow of oneself, as a dream, as an inner notion of language and sense, the traces of a medium that is also one of the frameworks of our personality.
Audio Field Report no. 39 / Sound activism 18: Interview with Laura Mello by Knut Remond. Limited Edition Audio cassette, 8 copies numbered. Available at 'ohrenhoch - the Noise Shop' (and can be heard on headphone in the ohrenhoch archive space).
Laura Mello lives and works since 2006 in Berlin as a composer, musicianand translator. In her musical works, intermedia performances and installations, she uses language and gesture as construction materialsand addresses the functions of these communication tools in our daily lifes. As an artist in residence in Q21, invited by Tonspur, she created the installation “Living Radio Hier und Jetzt”, which was based upon the live intervention “Living Radio”, that happened inside the courtyard in Museumsquartier Vienna on August 2015.
Website Laura Mello