The exhibition by Özcan Ertek and Bea Targosz focuses on non-human actors of the city network.
Two sound installations presented in the exhibition are dedicated to common urban animals: pigeons (Columba livia domestica) and firebugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus).
Both species are known for their preference to live in cities. Staying in humans’ nearest surroundings, they become some of our closest neighbors and active participants in the urban environment. They find their paths within infrastructures and architectures created after ISO standards, measurements and DIN regulations based on human scales, preferences, and organisms. As beings of different scales, animals find their own ways of approaching and using these structures, and by misusing them, they provoke new, different sounds.
Observing and listening to their ways of communicating or finding paths and homes allows us, humans, to realize, re-discover, or find new perspectives on familiar city surroundings: their structures, materials, and sounds. It is also an invitation to rethink and appreciate the whole spectrum of neighbors and co-creators of the urban environment with their multiple abilities, skills, and other-than-human scaling.
In their projects, the artists analyze, record and wonder about animals’ activities, paths, rhythms as well as their non-obvious sonic presences in the urban environment with an attempt to shift the perspective on the local infrastructures, participants and actual soundscape. They bring forth sounds that have been or could be produced by non-human citizens.
In his happenings / urban performances, Özcan Ertek speculates about how defensive architecture could be tamed by species affected by it—pigeons. Artifacts of the urban performances are positioned in the exhibition space and invite visitors to awaken new timbres from the metal spikes.
Bea Targosz brings forth the urban participation of firebugs—a colony of these common insects living, like the artist, in Neukölln. Sounds of their activities—such as cleaning antennas, waxing legs, copulating, moving small stones, and walking on leaves—have been recorded with amplified contact microphones and structured in the installation together with timbres captured in the nearest surrounding of the insects’ colony — in the city’s infrastructure (e.g. bridge construction) as well as from the soil.
In the exhibition space, the pieces are structured with overlaps, building a speculative soundscape of stories about the city tamed by its non-human dwellers.
During the exhibition, a line of performances takes place, introducing various local stories—soundings and compositions by sound artists living in Berlin.
As a part of the exhibition program, Max Joy, cem ç., Roberta Busechian with the Catalysts students will contribute with their live performances. Their performances will explore themes resonating with the perspectives and soundscapes presented by the artists, local stories offering additional layers to the urban narrative shaped by its human and non-human inhabitants.
