Topographies of Hearing: Kupfergarten

Christina Kubisch’s works make the surrounding space resonate, allowing us to experience it in all its complexity. In her “KUPFERGARTEN” (“Copper Garden”) as part of “Topographies of Hearing”, the sound artist consolidates political and economic problems as well as aesthetic and ecological issues. The walk-through installation in the MaerzMusik Library focuses on the inherent duality of copper as a material, highlighting its physical beauty while also emphasising its toxicity. At the same time, it offers a comprehensive, close-up perspective on a substance that can be used to illustrate global, colonial and economic dependencies as well as our overly exploitative relationship to the earth’s resources.

“Topographies of Hearing” is a series of sound installations, concerts and durational compositions commissioned by MaerzMusik that pose questions about immersive listening encounters and the ways they are experienced beyond concert halls and performance spaces. The festival has invited Audrey Chen, Hugo Esquinca, Christina Kubisch, Jessica Ekomane and Miya Masaoka to create site-specific sound art in the MaerzMusik Library at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, at the Akademie der Künste, at SAVVY Contemporary and at other locations in Berlin. These works deal with acoustic images and scenographies of the ear, examining the relationship between audience and environment. Through live concerts and performances that happen either spontaneously or at fixed times throughout the festival, they accompany MaerzMusik as immersive spaces of listening as well as collective experiences that challenge the politics of listening, opposing Western contexts of concert halls and sterile exhibition spaces. Physiological constraints – seated, frontal, contorted – are transformed into new realms of composing and performing music and sound. How can we make our movements resonate? How does the space shape our sound? What sonic imprint do our – human – bodies leave behind? And what can the sounds that came before us tell us about our past as well as choreograph our today and tomorrow?