Sounding Emergent Spatial Relations: Neukölln. Oliwa. Sonic Portrait

Walking through Berlin/Neukölln on a Saturday morning that feels like late summer in early October, the streets are calm, the blue sky lighting up through scattered clouds. The air is fresh and the pavement dusty, and the not-yet of a buzzing neighbourhood hangs like transparent beads between the four-storey residential buildings on Karl-Marx-Straße.

A pulse, steady and soft, gives a sense of grounding, while listening remains agile. Layers of sound pulse through each other, over each other, responding, adapting. They throw open a sense of place while allowing for a different kind of orientation.

Bea Targosz pressed play on her phone while we were standing in the outdoor passage leading to Heimathafen Neukölln and to the Galerie im Saalbau connecting the noisier street with a calm, plastered courtyard. We listen to a sequence of processed fieldrecordings which will be installed here soon as part of the programme marking Saalbau’s 150th anniversary. Targosz, based in Neukölln, talks about the artistic process of her collaboration with Marcin Dymiter, based in Gdánsk/Oliwa, that resulted in the sound artwork Neukölln. Oliwa. Sonic Portrait.

The artists began with field recordings made both in Neukölln and Oliwa, which they transformed in a MaxMSP patch into constantly changing sonic maps. Drawing on the logic of cartographic mapping, the system analyses, fragments and rearranges the recordings, randomly processing and redistributing sounds between two loudspeakers. The resulting soundscape shifts continuously, bringing the two places into an unstable, evolving relation, while the original portraits remain accessible via QR codes.

The technical process becomes a way of sonic thinking through and with the fleeting and layered aspects of place. The recordings are not simply transferred from one location to another; they are continuously analysed, fragmented, rearranged. Frequencies are isolated, measurement points reduced, sounds transformed into synthesized sinus tones. The timing, duration, sequence and distribution of these processes remain in flux. At times the recordings remain distinguishable, at times their processing brings them into closer proximity, while the changing distribution between the two loudspeakers creates an ongoing movement between Neukölln and Oliwa, between memories stored in places and new situative archives emerging in the present.

Listening to Neukölln. Oliwa. Sonic Portrait makes me think of its sonic intensities and shifting spatio-material agencies as a kind of nervous system: detecting, processing and responding to what passes through the loudspeakers, bouncing off walls, resonating with all kinds of soft tissues. High-pitched frequencies seep into a collage of street noises, enhancing a sense of tactility. The two channels carry field recordings from Neukölln and Oliwa, but these sounds are continuously transformed and rearranged. They never sound exactly the same in any given moment, and never fully resolve into one coherent composition or “work”. The installation remains responsive, its sonic relations constantly shifting, and thus, as a listener, I am asked to listen “beyond the ear,” a listening that “extends to a body sensing vibrations also while involving senses of vision, touch, thermoception, and proprioception” (Peterson 2021).

What is revealed of a place if we become a resonant body? What else is there in the cracks of the built surfaces, the soft tissue of dried leaves and damp earth, the rattling of moving objects – how do we connect place otherwise as “we ebb and flow across time and space – body, to body, to body, to body” (Neimanis 2017). Targosz uses locality to conceptualize listening as sonic relation, reciprocity and co-presence across distinct places. Neukölln. Oliwa. Sonic Portrait continually alters the conditions of listening, asking the listener to adjust, follow, pause and attune to relations that cannot be grasped all at once. Just off Karls-Marx-Straße in Neukölln, the listener becomes part of a sonic situation, and gets invited to trace the ways in which the sounds carry relations across bodies, technologies, local histories and translocal connections.

These connections are also explored by Dymiter who has been interested in how field recording can become a way of capturing the distinct sounds of historic Oliwa: the bells, the trees, the spacious areas around its historical buildings. Field recording encounters a tension here, since past sounds cannot simply be recovered; they are fleeting, and their vibrant traces can only become reenacted in the present. This tension becomes particularly tangible when Neukölln. Oliwa. Sonic Portrait is installed in the ethnographic section of the National Museum in Gdańsk’s Oliwa. The listener becomes attuned to the gaps between recording and memory, between what can be preserved and what remains elusive. Like memory, sound moves through these gaps. It carries, connects, disperses and transforms.

This resonates with Arjun Appadurai notion of the archive: “The archive as deliberate project is based on the recognition that all documentation is a form of intervention and thus, that documentation does not simply precede intervention but is the first step. […] This further means that archives are not only about memory (and the trace or record) but about the work of the imagination, about some sort of social project” (Appadurai 2003).
The two-channel installation of Neukölln. Oliwa. Sonic Portrait generates such a social project: an invitation to attune to the shifting relations between places and bodies, and to listen for those sounds that emerge only when we listen collectively, through other sounds, places, and memories.

References:

Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. Archive and Aspiration. In: Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder (eds.), Information is Alive, 2003. 14–25.

Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Peterson, Marina. 2021. “Listening in the Anthropocene, An Introduction.” Sensate Journal 8 (April 2021)