What does the final part of a person’s life sound like? These sounds often disappear behind closed doors. The world of old age needs a greater presence.
The artist Julia Wahren gains attention for this world. She meets old people, listens to them, collects stories and noises, cutlery clattering, clicking table tennis balls, rattling wheelchairs, ancient songs. Fragments of conversations with people, who talk of tiredness, courage and pain, of pleasure, fear, lonesomeness and of comradeship. Of approaching death, of emergencies, happiness and hope.
Julia Wahren turns voices and sounds into a composition and underlays it with associative music from trombonist Christofer Varner from Munich. What starts with a selection of recorded sounds is completed by the instrument and composition: the empathic artistic intervention provides the impressions to make a statement. The black & white pictures of the photographic artist Reiner Leist from New York are the visual pendant to the sound: portraits, close-ups, a pair of hands, an eye, a foot. Rooms in an old-peoples’ residence, stumbling footsteps, a nurse giving a pedicure, dressing hair. People alone and together. Personalities and situations that move and affect.
A project by
Julia Wahren
With
Reiner Leist (Photography), Christofer Varner (Trombone, conch shell horn), Paolo Mariangeli (Sound), Barbara Dolainsky (Editing), Reiner Kienemann (Projection engineering)
Julia Wahren, born in 1968 in Hanover, lives and works in Munich.
