Binaural Views of Switzerland

︎︎︎More photos below!

Listening to reality through the amplification of a microphone is like secretly entering the fabric of the world. It’s like drifting with your ears inside a dense matter, leaving your face out to breathe. It’s spying without malice. [...] It’s the clanging of cow bells woven with the cries of playful children, creating a sound substratum of the Alps; or that of a powerful mountain waterfall mingled into the roar of a military jet. In an unrestricted state of freedom in which things can flow, sounds move, influencing each other as if in an endless dance.
Alan Alpenfelt

Audio-visual installation
2019 ︎

︎Selected for Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection Edinburgh

Concept, journey, sound recording
Alan Alpenfelt

Kaiser Panorama
Franco Mondia & Antonio Lo Menzo.

Soundscape creations
Enrico Mangione

︎
Upcoming

30.8 - 9.9 2024
Festival Castel dei Mondi, Andria (I).

︎
Past

Brixton House
London, UK
8-12.3.2022
Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection
brixtonhouse.co.uk

SonOhr
Grand Palais, Bern, 2022

Edinburgh Fringe,UK
Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection
Summers of 2020 & 2021
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

Lugano High School 1
Lugano, CH
2 - 14.2. 2021

SonOhr Festival
Bern, CH
26.2 - 7.3.2021
https://sonohr.ch/
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

FIT Festival internazionale del Teatro e della scena contemporanea
LAC Hall - Lugano, CH
5.9 - 11.10.2020
https://www.fitfestival.ch/

PHOTO IS:RAEL
Tel Aviv, Israel
11.2020
(”Selfies” video sequence)
http://www.photoisrael.org

Swiss Stereoscopic Society annual assembly
La Chaux-de-Fonds, CH
14 - 17.2020
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

4th International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media
Lisbon, Portugal
18 - 20.6.2020
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

Accademia di Architettura
Università della Svizzera italiana
Mendrisio
14.11 - 5.12.2019

Binaural Views of Switzerland

is an audiovisual installation inspired by the philosophy of the Sublime. It focuses on the human being as the observer of a nature that he has tried to tame but whose effects (in particular mass tourism and its contribution to climate change) return with irrepressible violence.

The work reports on the changes caused by human activity in the Swiss landscape since 1863, when the British photographer William England participated in the first Grand Tours of Switzerland, taking stereoscopic photographs of more than 150 locations.

Over the course of a two-month journey, Alan Alpenfelt documented 30 of these locations, reporting on environmental and sound changes using binaural sound recording and 3D photography.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a modern reconstruction of a Kaiser Panorama - a public stereoscopic viewer from the 1800s - presenting Alan Alpenfelt's journey in dialogue with William England's original stereoscopic photographs. With the aid of headphones, visitors can also choose between the binaural soundscapes of the present and the imaginary ones of the past.

Discover more here
︎ binauralviewsofswitzerland.com

All the locations Alan visited on his journey, are placed in Google Maps Street View. Will you find them all?
︎ Here is one...