Holding Spaces. Projects.
Belavodye. Altai Mountains.
Crossing Borders Grant/ Bosch Foundation.
-
Excerpt from Radio Feature on BBC Shortcuts
It was a mountain, that was calling me. How? Over the internet of course. It simply hacked my google Algorythm.
It called out: Go to Altai, (what Altai? Where is that?)
Ah, the mountainous russian borderland between Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. (Okay!)
Find Belowodje!
Belowodje, the internet told me, was a hidden land from ancient times where people lived in peace and harmony. Only a few were allowed a glimpse.
I had to go.
For five days I sat on the transsiberian trainway. There was a circus lady sleeping on the bunk bed on top of me who told me she was good with monkeys and hippos. I learned lots of new card games and lost track of time and space...
A long radio feature for Deutschlandfunk Kultur, a poetic soundscape together with Matas Petrikas and a journey on Short Cuts on BBC 4.
The Connection Between Forest and Sea. Research Project. Part I: Sanriku Fukko National Park, Japan
Independent Research Project. Writing about the connections between Forest and Sea along the Northern Pacific Rim. Hatakeyama Oyster Farm.
-
“The old street branches off inconspicuously between a recently erected Seven Eleven and a Family Mart and soon leaves everything new and rebuilt behind to ascend narrow and steep into the mountains. Each needlepoint curb is marked by a round mirror to reflect oncoming traffic, a reminder of a bygone era, when traffic rules were imprinted in the roads themselves: speeding in such an infrastructure is impossible. Not many people use this route now. The canopy of trees, dense and vivid, the light flickering from leaf to leaf, and where the rays of sun hit the in-between-spaces, arboreal particles dancing in the golden hue. It is hard to keep the eyes on the street ahead. After about a quarter of an hour, the lane descends again and soon an even smaller path leads down towards a body of water, glistening in the distance." Wave Writer Fellowship by Okeanos Foundation
The Connection Between Forest and Sea. Part IV: Yakushima, Japan
Independent Research Project. Field Trip to Yakushima Island, Japan.
-
“On the way up, one encounters separate entities of endemic cedars and rocks, of moss and epiphytes, streams and marshes, becoming one indistinguishable, interconnected organism, radiating in viridescence. Pockets of this ravine thrive with a life force that pulses and breathes. Organic and inorganic textures hum the universal song of life. Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki eternalises this sensation as the spirit of the forest in his movie Princess Mononoke. He gives it the shape of a sacred deer with antlers like a slime mold growth. We arrive at a spot that must have served for this inspiration. Here, we breathe in the aerosols released by trees and mosses and they enter our bodies and fill our lungs. When it starts raining and we get drenched until not a single fibre of our clothes is dry and the wind sweeps up from the sea, we do not feel as cold as we should have."
World Whale Day
Script Writer. Producer.
-
Okeanos Foundation for the Sea asked me to produce a short piece for World Whale Day. I could choose from their film archive, and find my own voice and writing with it. Being a mother of three kids myself, seeing these big bodies caress each other so gently, it was clear I had to work with this footage. Writing about the whale families, I felt into their connections.
The music is composed by Dizzy Moon, a Berlin based cellist who grew up near the Sea in the Bretagne. The piece needed a deep bass, to reverberate these big bodies. Dizzy Moon's soundscape lets us explore the fathomless depth of motherly care.
Pinto na Makachero
Audio play with the children of Kibera Slum/ Kenya
-
Thanks to the invitation of One Fine Day I spent 10 days at Kibera slum to work with 60 children. They adapted the story of Emil and the Detectives to their environment. We collected sounds from the neighbourhoods, recorded the voices and stitched it all together to what was to become the first audio play in Swahili. Thanks to Christoph Kuchinke for helping with the editing, the kids for their concentration and all the enthusiastic teachers supporting us.
The Pearl
Senior Story-Writer for The Pearl, a 62 episodes radio drama produced in 15 Ugandan languages and broadcasted on 21 radio stations across Uganda, reaching 80% of Ugandan population.
-
The project was implemented by EARS - East Africa Radio Service and Media in Cooperation and Transition (MiCT) and funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
千絵の海. Wisdom of the Sea.
Independant Research Project on Bodies of Water in Japan/ Okeanos Foundation
-
Japan has a long culture of pilgrimages. There are the 33 Saikoku temples that teach compassion, the 88 temples of Shikoku, or the Kumano Kodo, the path to Kumano.
My own pilgrimage was to feel into the connections we have with water: the sea, rivers, canals, estuaries, waterfalls, sacred lakes, mundane ponds, aquascapes and street aquariums. The lives they hold; our estrangement from their flows and the loneliness this stirs within us. I am hoping to be taken to places and thoughts I had not foreseen.
The flickering reflections of liquid worlds, echoed by the silences of fish, the kelp forests where sea and land meet, silver scales left behind on fishing boats and abalone encounters in caves beneath the surface. Somewhere, I feel, in a river up in the mountains, an ancient salamander waits for all of this to pass.
With each step, each breath, each thought, I will connect to the urgent questions that arise in this age of the Anthropocene. The questions that the world is asking us.
Travelogues for Okeanos Foundation for the Sea. Feature on Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
The Connection between Forest and Sea. Research Project. Part II: Haida Gwaii
Independent Research Project. Writing about the connections between Forest and Sea along the Northern Pacific Rim. Visiting the Haida Nation on Haida Gwaii.
-
They're very, very tall kelps. When you dive in a forest, you can imagine being a bird from the tops of the trees and flying down to the bottom of the forest and landing at the bottom. And as you do that, you see this beautiful sunlight coming through the kelp forests, and then you get down to the bottom and you have a whole different understory layers. And so equivalent to the shrubs and mosses on land, you see that same structure with different kinds of seaweed as you're diving through the kelp forests and you see different animals that are living at the top of the canopy versus those that are living near the bottom and animals that are attached to the bottom of the ocean that are colorful and bright and look like plants. But they're really animals. It's really quite beautiful.” Wave Writer Fellowship by Okeanos Foundation. Interviews with Guujaaw, Jaleen Edenshaw, Dr. Tom Reimchen, Dr. Lynn Lee and others.
The Connection Between Forest and Sea. Research Project. Part V: Ama Divers, Japan
Independent Research Project. Writing about the connections between Forest and Sea along the Northern Pacific Rim. Field Trip to Kumano peninsula, Japan, and the Ama communities.
-
“When the sea is too rough, we don’t go out. This is one of the points where we are different to the male divers.” I have never heard about male “Ama” divers before. It’s a new trend, Aiko explains. Because there aren’t enough women to follow in the tradition, men are allowed lately to join as well. “But they do things differently and that is not always good.” she says. Male divers push harder. They will take out more abalones and go in any kind of weather. Aiko feels they take too much and don’t leave enough for the next year."
The Cosmic in the Cosmic Loom. Gropius Bau. Hella Jongerius.
The Cosmic in the Cosmic Loom. Facilitator.
-
Her hands intuitively respond, seeking the spiritual; they become teachers that eventually sensitise technology. Her approach is efficient, radical, and yet poetic and sensual.
Together we looked at the archetypes of weaving. We took inspiration from fairy tales, where the sister crafts of spinning and weaving surface time and time again as a medium that brings something into the world. The act of weaving may fuel desire (the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin creates gold from straw, the most humble of materials turned into the most valuable). It too can be dangerous if not properly handled (Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on the spindle wrong and a whole nation falls asleep for a hundred years). Conversely it can bring about a process of healing (the sister in The Six Swans weaves six magical shirts out of nettles collected in the moonlight). In such stories, wise women can sometimes appear, to catapult new narratives. My role was to find such people: shamans, energy workers, world-wanderers and witches, even. Women who have “learned the technology of ecstasy”, as the philosopher Mircea Eliade phrases it. To find them I had to connect with the river that runs through all of us. I meditated, practiced, sank in deep, trusted..."
Living Libraries for Nature Writing
Concept and Artistic Lead.The LIVING LIBRARY FOR NATURE WRITING is co-designed by citizens, cultural actors, environmental activists, young people and library staff.
-
Funded by the Federal Culture Foundation. Together with the city library of Kempten, Sonthofen and Wertach and Susa Pop/ Public Art Lab.
Love Rituals
Concept, script-writer and co-director for Love Rituals with Charlotte Roche on Arte TV.
-
Shortlisted for Bavarian Film Price and Grimme Price, winner of Art&TUR, Lissabon.
With Florianfilm.
The Connection Between Forest and Sea. Part III: Hoh Rainforest, Olympic Peninsula, USA
Independent Research Project. Writing about the connections between Forest and Sea along the Northern Pacific Rim. Sound recording Field Trip to Hot-Rainforest on Olympic Peninsula, Washington State.
-
A rainforest thriving through the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Sounds disappear in the old forest growth. Fern, lichen and moss swallow any voice. Only raindrops can be heard through foliage. This excursion became a chapter in our sound atlas book on silence. "The ancient-growth forest itself serves as an anechoic chamber, but this one is never static, is full of growth and decay, always breathing, making, changing. It is constantly both alive and dying. //Dwelling within the heart of the forest is the northern spotted owl, an endangered bird reliant on an endangered silence. The comb-like shapes of its wing feathers make it a noiseless flier; it chooses when and where it wants to be heard. The signal call: A series of four-noted hoots. Deep, pure tones. A sentence that carries far on still nights."
Whalefall
Immersive soundscape produced together with Matas Petrikas. With sounds from the Bedford Whaling Museum and the Dieter Paulmann Archive.
-
The piece is now part of the permanent exhibition of the Senckenberg Museum of Natural Histories, Frankfurt
Mirrored Cities. Artist.
Creating stories and soundscapes for a sense-based experience of a simultaneous interactive walk through Tel Aviv and Berlin
-
Curated by Avi Lubin.
With Susa Pop/ Public Art Lab, and artists Lila Chitayat and Anat Safran
Intelligent Landscapes
Concept and Artistic Lead. “Intelligent Landscapes” plays with the assumption that knowledge beyond the human-instigated agenda is at work in landscapes and the life forms interwoven within them.
-
Funded by the Federal Culture Foundation. Together with the city of Kempten and Susa Pop/ Public Art Lab.