MWith this aquanaut you could linger longer in the arctic soundscape of the Lofoten Islands, also because she is the only person on the shore of the otherworldly rocky backdrop. She wears an orange wetsuit and a reindeer hood. The water behind her shimmers in a sublime blue. While one has taken a seat at the edge of the video installation “Acoustic Ocean” between boxes of equipment, she works with great concentration on the hydrophones on the panoramic screen, which are supposed to register the sounds of fish and marine mammals. Do the different species communicate with each other? Or are we projecting the desire for interactive underwater life onto the sounds imperceptible to the human ear? The question immediately arises as to whether the scientist is a real marine biologist? Because the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann is known for allowing her staff to operate in complex ecosystems between reality and fiction.
Everything you hear in this visually stunning environment is actually the result of scientifically motivated recordings – albeit they are already half a century old. Since then, humans have brought the depths of the ocean to the brink of global catastrophe through climatic changes, incidental to ships and submarines interfering with the sound waves that whales use to communicate with each other. There is no trace of these dramas in Biemann’s natural idyll. Nevertheless, you think about them acoustically in the polar crackling atmosphere. Her protagonist is played by the Swedish-Sami singer and actress Sofia Jannok. With her recording devices she enters into a symbiosis with the fragile sea underworld – an almost utopian figure who approaches the bio-infrastructure of sound with the knowledge of its susceptibility to disturbances.
Is nature always superior to civilization?
In the exhibition “À bruit secret” Biemann is not the only one who goes under the water surface with hydrophones. Right from the start, Christina Kubisch is drawn into the depths of the Rhine in her installation “Il reno”. If you stroll with headphones along the long wall of windows with a view of the Rhine in the direction of the exhibition hall, you can hear the engine of a tanker that she has recorded or the rippling water that arrives on the banks. A beguiling Rhine symphony that certainly sounded different two hundred years ago. At the same time, it was a perfect attunement to the artfully staged noise that invaded the cities with industrialization and was welcomed by the Futurists. For example by the painter Luigi Russolo, who in his manifesto “L’art des bruits”, which was first published in French, demanded that noises from everyday life should expand the previous sound world of music.