Sneak audio-pod of Berlin Umbrella

Berlin Umbrella
to be launched in  Kreuzberg, Berlin on 3rd, 10th and 17th June, 2018.

For sneak preview/aural extract from Berlin Umbrella, see Lettretage.

My voice, James T Harding's and percussion, sound effects and
natural water sound recordings by Sonja Heyer.


See previous posts on 'How it happened.'

Nächster Beitrag

Berlin Umbrella: How it happened PART 3: The Sound Artist's p.o.v.

In Today's Blog, I'm handing over to my Collaborator on the 
Berlin Umbrella Project,  the Sound Artist, Sonja Heyer.

Sonja Heyer

Stephanie and I first met on a Scottish Hebridean island. She wrote poems,

I made sound recordings for my water archive, which I started to put on at 

that time. After that we lost sight of each other. Then four years ago suddenly

a mail: the Internet made  it is possible to find each other again. And soon

came the idea to try something together.  Water was my topic for a long time.

So when Stephanie showed up, it was natural to combine it with her poetry.

Previously,  I was working with a group of young Chinese-Taiwanese artists.
We had been invited to Lutherstadt Wittenberg for a one-month artist 
residence to the KulturBotschaft . It was November.

What do you do as a sound artist, if you are allowed to play a small court
garden in November? You are considering how to protect the speakers that
are used. So I came up with the idea to put small speakers in umbrellas. It worked! And transparent umbrellas made sure that the visitors could see
the starry sky during the audio walk. 

The listening umbrellas, or sound umbrellas, have since been my form into
which I can pack various contents.

Swopping Sound Umbrellas mid-walk

We then traveled as an artist group to an artist residence in Taiwan. 
The country was plagued by a prolonged drought for months. So water 
became my topic for the sound installation in Taiwan. I asked people 
what water meant to them and thus learned many touching stories. In 
order to absorb bubbling springs, they had to drive high into the mountains.
The rivers were dried up.

I invited Stephanie to Berlin and decided to record the Spree for one year 
from January to December 2017. I traveled to their sources in the Upper 
Lusatia, recorded the sound environment at the point where the river 
passes the border between Berlin and Brandenburg, dipped my underwater microphone (a 'dolphin's ear') in almost all city locks and accompanied the Spree 
to its mouth in Spandau. In January and December I recorded on the Lichtenstein Bridge, where in 1919 the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into the
water. In 2017, the canal wore a thin layer of ice.

A part of the Berlin excursions we have undertaken together. And to our surprise, it turned out that the water and sewage system of Berlin, the so-called radial system, was once a collaboration between British and German engineers. So far, I only knew the Radialsystem V, the art space on Holzmarktstraße. So my excursions allowed me to get to know my own city even better and from new sides!

UMBRELLA hat inzwische

Stephanie und ich, wir lernten uns einst auf einer schottischen Insel kennen. Sie schrieb Gedichte, ich machte Tonaufnahmen für mein Wasserarchiv, das ich zu dieser Zeit begann anzulegen. Danach verloren wir uns aus den Augen. Dann vor vier Jahren plötzlich eine mail: das Internet machte

 es möglich, sich wiederzufinden. Und bald entstand die Idee, etwas gemeinsam zu versuchen.

Ich arbeitete gerade mit einer Gruppe junger chinesisch-taiwanesischer Künstlerinnen zusammen. Wir waren nach Lutherstadt Wittenberg für eine einmonatige artist residence an die KulturBotschaft eingeladen worden. Es war November.

Was macht man als Klangkünstlerin, wenn man einen kleinen Hofgarten im November bespielen darf? Man überlegt, wie man die Lautsprecher schützen kann, die zum Einsatz kommen. So kam ich auf die Idee, kleine speaker in Regenschirme zu setzen. Es funktionierte! Und durchsichtige Schirme sorgten dafür, dass die BesucherInnen während des Hörspaziergangs den Sternenhimmel sehen konnten.

Die Hör-Regenschirme oder sound umbrellas, sind seitdem meine Form, in die ich verschiedene Inhalte packen kann.

Wir reisten dann als KünstlerInnengruppe zu einer artist residence nach Taiwan. Das Land wurde zu dieser Zeit von einer seit Monaten anhaltenden Dürre geplagt. So wurde Wasser zu meinem Thema für die Klanginstallation in Taiwan. Ich fragte Menschen, was ihnen Wasser bedeutet und erfuhr auf diese Weise viele berührende Geschichten. Um sprudelnde Quellen aufnehmen zu können, mussten hoch ins Gebirge fahren. Die Flussläufe waren ausgetrocknet.

Wasser blieb lange mein Thema. Als Stephanie auftauchte, lag es daher nahe, es mit ihrer Poesie zu verbinden. Ich lud sie nach Berlin ein und beschloss, ein Jahr lang, von Januar bis Dezember 2017, Tonaufnahmen von der Spree zu machen. Ich reiste zu ihren Quellen in die Oberlausitz, nahm das sound environment an der Stelle auf, an der der Fluss die Grenze zwischen Berlin und Brandenburg passiert, tauchte mein Unterwassermikrofon in fast alle Stadtschleusen und begleitete die Spree bis zu ihrer Mündung in Spandau. Im Januar und im Dezember machte ich Tonaufnahmen an der Lichtensteinbrücke, an der 1919 die Leiche Rosa Luxemburgs ins Wasser geworfen wurde. 2017 trug der Kanal eine dünne Eisschicht.

Einen Teil der Berlin Exkursionen haben wir gemeinsam bestritten. Und zu unserer Überraschung stellte sich heraus, dass das Wasser- und Abwassersystem Berlins, das sogenannte Radialsystem, einst aus einer Zusammenarbeit britischer und deutscher Ingenieure entstand. Ich hatte bislang nur das Radialsystem V, den Kunstraum an der Holzmarktstraße, gekannt. So erlaubten mir unsere Ausflüge, meine eigene Stadt noch einmal besser und von neuen Seiten kennenzulernen!

UMBRELLA hat inzwischen viele Stationen erlebt. Berlin UMBRELLA bedeutet für mich, zum ersten Mal mit Poesie zu arbeiten – eine wundervolle Möglichkeit! Stephanie hat die Offenheit der Hör-Regenschirme inhaltlich und formal aufgegriffen: Ihre Verse funktionieren wie kleine Geschichten, die sich separat aber auch im Zusammenspiel mit anderen erschließen. Die Hör-Regenschirme wiederum bilden einen halboffenen Raum: man kann sich hörend darunter zurückziehen, man kann den Schirm aber auch vor sich ins Gras legen; dann vermengen sich die sound loops mit der Hörumgebung. Schließlich kann man Schirme mit anderen BesucherInnen tauschen – eine schöne Gelegenheit, miteinander ins Gespräch zu kommen, oder einfach gemeinsam zu lauschen.

Berlin Umbrella: How it Happened Part 2: the Poet's p.o.v.

On another day, I made a trip up and down the Spree from the Dom (the Cathedral) round the Museum Insel (Island) then up past the Reichstag to the Tiergarten and back again which was a good introduction to the city's history. I knew I wanted to incorporate that inner-city trip but for it to be more than just a description of architecture plus facts about World War 2 destruction and the Cold War. (For instance, I learnt that the river was one of the boundaries during the Cold War.) 

Stories, people connected to the city's history through its river is what I wanted to discover.  Back home, during research into river connections with the Nazis, I came across two horrific atrocities - the first, the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, communist and critic of the Nazis, whose murdered body was weighted and thrown into the Spree;

Rosa Luxemburg

 the second atrocity happened in Hitler's last few days, when he was hiding in his bunker and heard rumours that the Russians were advancing through the underground systems. Hitler ordered the wall separating the underground from a lock on the canal that leads off the Spree to be blown up, so that the underground was flooded, drowning thousands of Berliner civilians who used the tunnels as air raid shelters, also drowning wounded troops lying in hospital carriages.

But that is to jump ahead.  To go back to my on the spot research in Berlin,  it helped to already have seen the white crosses put up on the riverbank below the Reichstag in memory of those who were shot and drowned attempting to swim to freedom during the Cold War.  The drownings were all along the Spree but they decided it was more effective to have one spot as a memorial.

On the Spreeboden, riverbank below the Reichstag.

 I knew that the giant statue, Molecule Man by Jonathan Borofsky, a symbol of hope, would appear in one of my poems. The statue appears to walk on the river between the opposite banks of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, districts separated during the Cold War, but now united.

Molecule Man by Jonathan  Borofsky.

One warm evening, Sonja had another engagement, so I sauntered along the river to Montbijou where people were relaxing with beers sitting on deckchairs or on the grass banks around an open-air tango area. I too watched the impressive tango dancing, had a beer and a hot-dog (Sonja was horrified when I told her. That was not a German sausage) and also chatted to a few people - who mainly turned out to be tourists from other German cities, and one English couple, about what they liked about rivers/ water in cities, so some of their thoughts appear in my poems. Thanks to any of those people if you are reading this. As the sun set and the lights came on along the river banks, it was time to head back.

Not all my research was river-based. I also visited the Nikolaikirche which is now a local history museum as a graphic way of learning about Berlin's history. Also the Film Museum, because Berlin is Film and you can't not go. 

Asta Nielson, silent movie star

I'm delighted I managed to get Asta Nielson, one of the early stumm (silent) movie stars into the poems. She refused to work for propaganda films for Hitler and managed to survive. Her films were made using silver nitrate film (later discontinued since they were highly flammable) but which gave films of that era their glossy black. 

Films unspooling, looping like memory, images rising and falling like reflections in the river...the metaphoric possibilities already playing in my mind.  To see what resulted,  you will have to listen to the poems.

Berlin Umbrella : how it happened. PART 1: the Poet's p.o.v.

As the launch of this Poetry/Sound collaboration 'aural walk' approaches, (June 3rd, 10th and 17th June, 2018 in Berlin (see previous post), here is my diary notes on our research and development during  2 weeks in July 2015:

Sonja Heyer with Sound Umbrella

A Sound Artist's work was completely new to me, so it was with great excitement that I accepted my friend Sonja Heyer's invitation to collaborate on a poetry/sound project.   Sonja's suggestion for the topic we would explore was Water. Wonderful! Already I could envisage imaginative possibilities.

 Sonja has an archive of water sounds from different sources and has already devised many aural walks using text but she had never used poetry before.  Recently she had been invited to Taiwan to visit the city's water sources in the hills, make recordings and devise a water installation.  The experience was hugely exciting and I watched a vimeo she had made of the trip, the aural walk she had devised collaborating with Taiwanese performers.

 Using transparent plastic umbrellas, the curved ones that form an enclosure around the user, a sound world is created with recordings played through tiny loudspeakers inside the umbrella - where the handle meets the spokes. Participants go on an aural walk, listening to the umbrella recordings on a self-directed route.

Although Sonja has used text inside her umbrellas before - most recently a quotation from Luther about death, (for his centenary year at Lutherstadt Wittenberg) she has never used poetry before.  So this was to be a new experience for her too.


So our subject was to be Berlin Water. More detail as to content could wait. First we were more concerned to establish the poetic form or approach that would work with Sonja's water sounds. I had already done some preparation by reading a few river or water-inspired collections  and  had brought along Alice Oswald's 'Dart' .  Sonja loved the flowing nature of this epic-length poem of mini-narrations with a variety of voices: the river itself, people who have river-related jobs, fishermen, poachers, the drowned, supernatural creatures etc.

But Sonja also liked the haiku I brought along, and the idea of  very small poems that could be read in any order. This was so that the participants could swop umbrellas mid-walk and so create different sequences, in a sense make their own poems. Of course, Sonja as a sound artiste was interested in effects achieved by playing around with different sonic patterns, vibrations, rhythms.  But how would it work for words and any linear thought? It seemed quite a challenge to my usual approach. But hey! No harm being shaken out of my comfort zone and I was excited to try a new way of thinking. For this to work, I felt, it meant a series of both haiku-like, imagistic poems, and a series of fragments developing links like rhyzomes.  Connected, then disconnected, reforming, looping, like memory, unrolling like film....already ideas beginning to rise.

So from the start, we had in mind small poems of intense images, like water drops, and other more flowing pieces of watery subject matter and how to achieve both was the challenge for me.

Right, so now we moved on to discuss the subject matter in more depth. What would we cover? The Spree, the river which flows through Berlin of course but what aspect and what other watery subjects?   River-related history?  Ecological aspects? The nature of water?

Googling Berlin +Water I  discovered the existence of an old Waterworks Museum, called Friedrichshagen (every other place or building is Friedrich-something in Berlin, after the Prussian leader)  by the Müggelsee - an inland lake and part of the river Spree.  It was a very hot day - and the thought of trip out of the sultry city to the countryside, a bit of research followed by a boat trip round the lake seemed ideal.  We took the S-Bahn down - about half an hour, then the bus to the Waterworks.

Friedrichshagen. Waterworks, in the Brandenburg Marcher Lords style - Gothic/Baronial redbrick.

It was cool and dark inside the Museum luckily.The curators were delighted to see us as they had  no other visitors, and were happy to turn on the asthmatic Old Wheezer pump for us (usually only switched on at a scheduled time which we had missed.) It was obvious how it got its name.  Sonja recorded it and it will surely go in the finished collaboration.  Perfect. Already ideas simmering as to how this might be used.

  The Museum was a fascinating record of all the issues of Berlin's water and sewage systems- from the early days, with hollowed out oaks pipes carrying water to old-fashioned street water pumps,

Water pump in grounds of Friedrichshagen. (Museum
 exhibit. )  We were  warned not to go too near as the bees
 were drinking from the stone bowl and might attack us.

and documentation of the horrific outbreaks of typhoid and cholera epidemics until right up until the discovery  in the 19th century of the cause of these diseases by an English man Jon Snow -it was water pumps infected by sewage -and this knowledge spread to the rest of Europe. Hence in the 1870's an English engineer, Henry Gill was invited to sort out Berlin's water problems. Who would have thought this could be so fascinating!  And it was a German/British collaboration! Just like Sonja's and mine. Friedrichshagen was the last of the three Berlin waterworks Gill built - and what a palace it is, almost a Cathedral to Health! No expense spared.

 At the same time, James Hobrecht, of Prussian birth, sorted out the sewage system with his Radial System of sewage pumping stations.  Co-incidentally, one of the former Radial Systems (V), is now a cutting edge arts centre which we  attended during a festival of acoustic music.

But to go back to our day out at Friedrichshagen, in the end we missed the boat trip round the Müggelsee but a different trip on offer seemed more enticing - the ferry back to the city. Much nicer than slogging back to the S-Bahn and a chance for me to observe watery images and sounds of all types - the light on water, on boats, movement of waves, the throb of the engine. I was taken by the Huckleberry Finn type rafts with sheds on top drifting by  though sadly these never ended up in the poems.


 


 However the party boats did.  One of these became stuck in front of our ferry and it took some time for the rather drunk but hugely apologetic crew to disentangle themselves and head out of the way. Plaintive cries of  'Entschuldigung… Entschuldigung…' ('Sorry...Sorry...') from them faded as our ferry chugged on.

As you can see from the photo above, we were mightily pleased with our first day's research, coupled with a wonderful excuse for a trip on a river boat, a relaxing way to get a bit of a sun tan, and as we decided to sit in silence on the way back, to reflect and  to meditate  over ideas for possible poems in my case, and possible sounds for Sonja, followed by, what else, a river-bank (or rather an inlet off the Spree) open-air restaurant near Treptow.  Willows drooped in the water. It could have been Twickenham or Marlow, except for the loud music booming from a restaurant across the narrow inlet.

Part 2 follows in next Blog.

Berlin Umbrella

Berlin du bist so Wunderbar. Berlin you are so wonderful. Tourist river boat on Spree.

                          Poetry by Stephanie Green and Sound by Sonja Heyer                                                                            A Poetry and Sound walk with Sound Umbrella
                                              Berlin Umbrella,
                                            will be available at
                                  Viktoria Park, Kreuzberg, Berlin
                       on Sundays 3rd, 10th and 17th June, 2018 from 2-6pm.
                           
                                 6 different sequences. Do one or more.
                                      7 mins each. Total lasts 45 mins.

                           Collect umbrella at Cafe Golgatha. FREE but deposit for umbrella.

                          Under the auspices of lettretage Literature House.

If you are in Berlin, come along. Pick up an umbrella (available on site) and listen to poetry on the theme of water to the sound of water recordings from a tiny loudspeaker within the umbrella whilst walking alongside the river through the park.

Friedrichshagen 19th c Water Pumping Station

 The 6 different sequences are inspired by aspects relating to the river Spree - geological and ecological, folklore and history.  Ranging from glacial origins to cholera epidemics, 19th c water 'palaces' (pumping stations), Nazi atrocities and Cold War tragedies up to the fall of the Berlin wall and contemporary issues,  the poems are interwoven with natural water sounds recorded at the exact spot in places mentioned in the poetry including the source of the river in the Lausatian mountains, the 'old wheezer' pump at Friedrichshagen 19th c Pumping Station  and the river bank where Rosa Luxemburg's corpse surfaced.

See visit Berlin  Viktoriapark

Berlin Collaboration

Radialsystem V

Just back from a trip to Berlin to collaborate with Sonja Heyer,  artist/musician on a poetry/soundscape project. More I will not say at this stage as the project is still in development except to say it involved  an approach to writing poetry as a response to sound which was hugely exciting...and trips to places tourists do not usually go!

In this photo we are at RadialSystem V, a former sewage pumping station, now a 'cutting edge'  Arts Venue in former East Berlin attending 'Heroines of Sound' a festival of electronic music.  This was part of research....we were not performing!

  They have great sunsets from the shore-side cafe overlooking the river Spree too.