Sound essay "Bildung" will be premiered as a sound installation at the opening of the exhibition "Majątek"
Królikarnia, Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Warsaw
15/03/2015, 18.00
Michał Libera - recordings, montage
Ralf Meinz - recordings, sound design
Tony di Napoli - performance on litophones
Curated collectively under direction of Agnieszka Tarasiuk.
The team: Katarzyna Kucharska-Hornung, Karolina Puchała-Rojek, Krzysztof Pijarski, Jan Sowa, Michał Libera
One of the two features of "Majątek"
exhibition is an extraordinary collection of sculptures developed by von Rose
family in 1930-ies, in a small town of Eastern Prussia called Döhlau (now: Dylewo).
Consisting mainly of Adolfo Wildt marbles, it was violently put to an end during
World War II when the property was demolished and ruined. Sculptures remained
underground for over 50 years until excavations by an archeological crew
directed by Tomasz Mikocki were undertaken. What then became the collection of
National Museum in Warsaw are sculptures distorted and disintegrated. Due to
chemical processes some of them were turned into "sand" while others gained
new colors and shapes. Most of the items seem nothing but random stones, others
- oddments of once great pieces of art.
Looking at them - whether you call them stones, sculptures
or remains just doesn't matter - the history seems at the same time continuing
and mute. No recordings have survived WWII. More than that - it is barely possible
that any of them had ever existed. We don't know the local soundscape of 1930-ies,
past voices of the inhabitants are inevitably gone - everything there was to
hear back then got disintegrated immediately, incomparably faster than the
disintegration of the stones which proceeds until now.
It is disintegration where the voice and the stones
meet at the same time becoming the topic of sound essay. "Bildung"
consists exclusively of recordings of today's Döhlau remains, marble from "cave
di marmo" in Carrara used by Adolfo Wildt, sculptures from
"Majątek" exhibition and limestone of one of the first stone
instruments ever - litophone. They are all brought together with the voice of
Sibylle Friedberg, von Rose family descendent who is recollecting her past
memories and reading fragments of philosophical texts. One of them comes from Immanuel
Kant's "Critique of Judgement" which also delivered the essay's title.
It is not easy to translate it in a word. "Bildung" means education
in a sense originating from its Enlightenment axioms; it means shaping and integrity.
It also means formation, not excluding its chemical connotation. All the
meanings were of importance to Kant when he attempted to clear out his vision
of art referring to salt crystallization. All of them are also fundamental for
the exhibition bringing together art, historical fall of a social formation and
disintegration of stone.
