Spacialized 8 channel sound installation, 11'11''
2012

Kultur:Stadt, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin

8 microphones were installed along straight line of 60 meters in the middle of the Brazilian Mata Atlántica Rainforest. the resulting spacial recording was then placed along small path through the tiergarten park in Berlin, mixing with the exhisting sounds in a growing cicle of 11 minutes that ended abruptly, leaving the listener alone with the real sound of the park.

The real and the unreal were mutually enhaced raising spatial and listening atention, and somehow modifying the movement and the walk of the unaware passerby.

The work started in snowy february and end up in june, changing its acoustics because of the growing leaves and of the animals awakening through spring.

a text piece was specially made for the exhibition catalogue:

The Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Forest) is a region of tropical forest which extends along the Atlantic coast of Brazil from north to south, and inland as far as Paraguay and the Misiones Province of Argentina. Once a hunting ground of the Electors of Brandenburg the Tiergarten park of today was designed in the 1830s by Peter Joseph Lenné. In 1894 the Reichstag building opened there as the German parliament. It was the first environment that the Portuguese conquerors encountered over five hundred years ago when it had an area of 1,500,000 km2

On January 15, 1919, the socialist Karl Liebknecht was shot by Freikorps soldiers within the park near the lake Neuer See. The corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, murdered on the same day, was found in the nearby Landwehr Canal on June 1, 1919. Despite so little forest remaining, it remains extraordinarily lush in biodiversity: 40 percent of its vascular plants and up to 60 percent of its vertebrates are endemic species, meaning they are found nowhere else in the world.

The enormous biodiversity results in part from the wide range of latitude it covers, its variations in altitude, its diverse climatic regimes, as well as the geological and climatic history of the whole region. The first Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research) of Magnus Hirschfeld was situated near the contemporary Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 1919 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933.

The Mata Atlântica has been facing threats from humans for decades: almost 88 percent of the original forest has been lost and replaced by modified landscapes. After 1944 the park was largely deforested, as it served as a source of firewood for the devastated city.

11,000 species of plants and animals are considered threatened today in the Mata Atlântica, that harbors around 27,000 species. From 1996 to 2003, and in 2006, the Love Parade took place at the Victory Column and the Strasse des 17. Juni.

New species are continually being found in the Mata Atlântica. In fact, between 1990 and 2006 over a thousand new flowering plants were discovered. On July 24, 2008, Barack Obama spoke at the Victory Column in front of 250,000 people.