Do people leave behind personal emotions in a place? Are they perceptible, measurable, transferable, retrievable? For the three-part series “Songs of the Siren”, Emanuel Mooner explores abandoned sites and their often troubled histories in an interactive project. The artist works with the atmosphere of empty buildings and moves at the boundaries of audibility. Visitors explore abandoned sites, some of which have been dormant for years, piece by piece. The reduction to auditory perception allows participants in this walk-in sculpture to experience sounds, associations and moods in a new way.
In the second part of the series “Songs of the Siren, Part II – White Noise: Musique Nonstop”, Emanuel Mooner takes the audience to an empty grocery store on Tegernseer Landstraße, where the workers of the Agfa camera factory used to buy food for their shifts. No customers have entered the shop since around 1990 – a motorway was built in front of the shop, the Mittlerer Ring was widened to seven lanes and the Agfa factory was demolished in 2007.
The end of the Tegernseer Landstraße is one of the noisiest areas of the city, polluted with particulate matter and car noise. Yet this supposedly deserted area harbours an intact world, a microcosm frozen in time. Using acoustic means, the artist creates connections between past and present, decay and new beginnings.
Emanuel Mooner, born in 1972 in Munich, lives and works in Munich.
