Response to Public and Private Listening, Sonozones, at “Prekäre Landschaften”

Voegelin was invited to act as a respondent to Sonozones, a public art research project part of Prekäre Landschaften, organised between ZHDK, University of the Arts Zurich, Switzerland and Urbane Künste Ruhr.

Voegelin's response to the works by Cathy van Eck and Kirsten Reese and Trond Lossius, commissioned and accompanied by Jan Schacher in the context of the practice-based research project ‘sonozones’ articulates the notion of a sonic public art: to contextualise and interrogate the artists' work in relation to Mülheim as town and as concept of townness, as social sphere and infrastructure with an economic and political history, a present use and an aesthetic façade that will give way to an unstoppable future.

All three works, and the project as a whole, raise pertinent artistic, scholarly as well as socio-political and ethical questions. What does the artist do in a town that she does not live in - how to relate to the economic and socio-political reality and aesthetics of place without inhabiting it? Is this the artist as ethnographer or as missionary, as translator and instigator encouraging a local audience to re-consider their locale; or is indeed the audience somewhere entirely different, the town but a backdrop, an almost arbitrary stage to perform art whose context is elsewhere.

Proceedings are currently being prepared for publication

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