HAMBURG.- “Through music and sound I am able to describe extremely complex contexts, contents, systems and emotions that reach viewers directly. For me, music plays an important role as a form of communication, as an element of translation.” —Annika Kahrs
The sound and video installation how to live in the echo of other places is a new production by Annika Kahrs, staged in the last unrenovated warehouse building in the former Free Port of Hamburg, the present-day HafenCity. IMAGINE THE CITY's most extensive exhibition project to date is dedicated to the peculiarities of acoustic and visual recollections and explores how they relate to particular places. Throughout the summer, the two-part work alternately makes use of the interior space and the façade of Schuppen 29 (Shed 29) to make other people’s fleeting—and personal—experiences palpably accessible to visitors.
These two complementary components pick up on the location’s special atmosphere. During the day, listeners have the opportunity to individually retrace an audio itinerary inside the shed. At sunset, a 14 meter-wide video projection is then activated on the front elevation of the building, making the site visible from afar throughout the night hours; it comes to an end at sunrise. Over a period of thirteen weeks, personal stories from different times and different places will be interwoven here as they interact with the premises of this former cocoa warehouse.
For this spatial installation, ten Hamburg musicians have composed their own works in dialogue with Annika Kahrs. To this end, each musician spoke at length with someone to whom they felt a particular attachment about places with personal memories. Short pieces were created on this basis, which Kahrs then translated into a spatial arrangement with the assistance of composer Louis d´Heudières. During the 80-minute “concert within the space”, eleven loudspeaker boxes scattered around the premises bring together, among other things, Hamburg’s urban space between the port and St. Michael’s Church, migration experiences and earthquakes as sound phenomena. The themes are as diverse as the musical styles and compositional strategies. With Ferdinand Försch, Douniah, Louis d`Heudières, TINTIN PATRONE, Tam Thi Pham, Jesseline Preach, Carlo Andrés Rico, Freja Sandkamm, Nika Son and Derya Yıldrırım.
The video installation is based on short texts about memories of a particular place during a sunset, which musicians, friends and colleagues sent in to Kahrs for the purposes of this work. The artist, for her part, looks at the question of whether and how intense visual impressions can be bound to specific locations in our memories. Sunsets are in principle always the same and yet, ever since the age of Romanticism, Western cultures have perceived them as special moments that stand out from long forgotten everyday experiences. Indeed, they symbolise the finite-infinite duality of time: with each sunset, another day has passed in a person’s life and, at the same time, the sun reliably sets anew every day, for all eternity (almost), everywhere in the world.
The anonymised material is projected word for word onto a digitally created sunset in a non-specific location. In the course of the loop lasting approximately two-and-a-half-hours, the scenes—some of them special, others all too quotidian—are gradually assembled in the minds of the viewers.
The project is organized within the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022.
