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.
The trilogy “Songs of the Siren” ends with the acoustic environment “Farewell Song”, somewhere in Denning. An old apple tree stands in the garden of an abandoned house. The apples are ripe, but there is no one there to eat them. The house is empty, about to be demolished. Inside, the smoke alarms are beeping away. The bark, fruit and leaves of the apple tree are converted into MIDI data (and therefore sound) by a frequency converter, allowing the tree to sing one last song before it is cut down.
Emanuel Mooner, born in 1972 in Munich, lives and works in Munich.
