2022/2023 | sound installation, 8 speakers, 8 bird nesting boxes, forest and animal sounds | Exhibition view Vogelklang-Soundcamp 2023, Black Forest | Foto: Irene Pérez Hernández.
Created in 2023 in the context of the artist residency @ Kunstverein Global Forest in St. Georgen for the “Vogelklang” (“bird sound”) sound camp in the Black Forest near St. Georgen/Furtwangen/Triberg.

What does home („Heimat“) mean to you? What melodies do you associate with this individual idea of home? These were the questions I asked in order to find people in St. Georgen and the surrounding area who want to participate in my project “Rhapsody (Black Forest Edition)”.
Rhapsody tries to rethink the concept of home as a polyphonic sound, that forms a home in which all people as well as animals and nature are equally involved. To find a universal, common language, I asked people to whistle their melodies. An identification of personal characteristics such as age, sex or origin was no longer possible on the basis of voice.

The recordings of the whistled melodies are now played from small loudspeakers in the forest, so that the whistling blends in the natural sound carpet of the Black Forest. People, birds and the wind in the trees now whistle together. Thus a sound image of home arises, a large whole, which nevertheless allows polyphony and diversity. After the sound camp is over, only the loudspeakers are removed, the bird nesting boxes are left to the animals in the forest.
The melodies were whistled by Metin Akcham, Gafur Camtay, Garbi Camtay, Nebahat Camtay, Gülüsan Çetin, Mehmet Çetin, Nikita Federov, Kerstin Grießhaber, Nailton Heringer, Wolodimir Kmoruzkevskyi, Engin Köker, Merve Köker, Daniel Leguy-Madžar, Danyi Martynchuk, Ömer Sahin, Tuba Sahin, Awa Samura, Rodion Stupar, Ekaterina Suzanskaya and Lingqi Zhang.

Thank you for facilitating and supervising the project to Daniel Leguy-Madžar, Irene Pérez Hernández, Norbert Schnell and Olsen Wolf and all the people involved.