Thank you, honestly, thank you
The Sky is a sea of darkness, when there is no sun to light the way.
Sun Ra Arkestra
Neither will it be other than other, while it remains one; for not one, but only other, can be other than other, and nothing else.
Plato
Sun Ra Arkestra
Neither will it be other than other, while it remains one; for not one, but only other, can be other than other, and nothing else.
Plato
Text
2023 ︎
Work in progress
Part of:
Common Actions
by Olivia Wiederkehr
https://www.oh-wiederkehr.ch/
Dramaturgs
Letizia Russo
Manolis Tsipos
A work in progress on Free to be grateful - n° 18 of the Freedom of action Manifesto by Olivia Wiederkehr.
Can you be grateful to a person you never knew but who you are directly related to and that the most difficult thing to tell this person is that you are grateful?
Can you be grateful to a person you never knew but who you are directly related to and that the most difficult thing to tell this person is that you are grateful?
Waste Kompost Radio
In every piece of recorded sound, there is a kind of potential for its undoing [...] you can actually recompose as well as deconstruct the underlying logic of a tune and make something completely other out of it.
The Strangeness of Dub - Edward George
The Strangeness of Dub - Edward George
Sound Installation
2022 ︎ Work in progress
Concept & Waste collection
Daniela Allocca
Alan Alpenfelt
Sustained by:
Pro Helvetia
Migros Kultur Prozent
︎
Upcoming:
Radio Launch - 2023
Waste Kompost Radio is a radio flow composed of sonic waste discarded during editing processes. Radios, composers, artists from around the world are invited to send their unwanted “sound waste”, everything which has been considered wrong or useless and therefore cut out. It is collected and processed through algorithms which gradually decompose the information in the same way biological and chemical reactions decompose organic material into compost.
The time in which we live is characterised by a disproportionate production of objects, which translates into a disproportionate production of waste. According to some scholars we have moved from the anthropocene to the Wasteocene (Armiero, 2021): we are in fact living in the age of waste. The culture of waste is a culture that has unlearnt to reuse waste or to envisage a production where nothing has to be discarded. We are fed official narratives to follow and asked to relegate waste to unseen hiding places, we use the margins as a receptacle for the unseen rather than enhancing them as a place of richness and proliferation of diversity.
Art finds its life in waste. Art is not immediately something beautiful to look at or listen to. But Art can help us rethink official paradigms by taking discarded imperfections and offering us a lense into looking at them more closely. Inside the narratives of waste we might find that unwantedness is the source for a new and healthier world.
This is why we wish to explore the concept of compost and create a parallel system that decentralizes humans from their main narratives and places them as listeners of what they decide is not fit. It means assuming responsibility for what is being discarded and at the same time asks them to contribute actively in a conscious way.
Compost is the observable proof of how life is a cycle made of interacting differences, where nothing remains the same and everything serves a greater purpose.
Waste Kompost Radio constitutes a place of sonic inclusion where its practices learn from the forest how to relate to all living things. This inclusive process operates as a translation taking place in compost, recovering what is considered unproductive, excluded and useless and transforms it into a sonic fertilizing substance, giving it back in an enriched form to the cycle of life.
The work is now in its initial creation phase. WKR will launch in 2023.
Site
wastekompostradio.com
︎
Past
WKR public launch
Palazzo Trevisan, Venice
Pro Helvetia Arts Residency
17 - 23 October 2022
Le Festival des Échecs
Espace libre Visarte
Biel/Bienne (CH)
30.6 - 28.7.2021
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
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
No exhibitions scheduled atm.
︎
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 audio-visual observation of the changes caused by human activity in the Swiss Landscape since 1863, when the pioneering British photographer William England made his Grand Tour of Switzerland, creating stunning stereoscopic photographs of over 150 locations.
Artist Alan Alpenfelt, over a two month journey, re-discovered 30 of these locations, documenting the changes in their aspects and atmospheres, re-presenting them in his exhibition, using binaural sound recording and 3D photography.
His work highlights the stark contrasts between past and present by immersing the visitor in the sights and sounds of each environment, then and now.
The centre of the exhibition is a Kaiser Panorama, which features the stereoscopic photographs linked to headphones through which the visitor can choose between the contrasting binaural soundscapes of the present day or the imagined ones of the past.
Awareness of the effects of mass tourism, modern transport, climate change and industrial development pervades the exhibition, stimulating questions as to how resilience and conservation can somehow still be achieved.
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...
Special thanks to
London Stereoscopic Company and Peter Blair for providing information on William England.
Funded by
Pro Helvetia
FSRC/SRKS
Oertli Stiftung
London Stereoscopic Company and Peter Blair for providing information on William England.
Funded by
Pro Helvetia
FSRC/SRKS
Oertli Stiftung
I Am Here Now
I will examine the memories of extreme experiences; of offences undergone or offences inflicted. In this case every, or almost every thought which could obliterate or deform mnemonic recording is laboured: the memory of a trauma, suffered or inflicted, is in itself traumatic because it hurts to remember or, at the very least, it will disturb. He who was injured, tends to remove that memory in order to not renew the pain; he who instead inflicted, chases the memory back into the depths, to free himself, to reduce his guilt.
Primo Levi
The drowned and the saved
Primo Levi
The drowned and the saved
Audio installation
2015 - 2018
Concept, interviews, sound design
Alan Alpenfelt
Paintings
Ravi Tironi
In collaboration with
RSI - Rete Due
We are distinguished by our own history. Our choices and destiny depend upon it. Knowing the story of who surrounds us allows us to know ourselves better. But bombarded by images of war and inherent tragedy from the rest of the world, in part inured to them, in part addicted to evil, we forget to question what happens to the people that have truly experienced the reality of these devastating hostilities.
In 1991 Ex Jugoslavia was subjected to an appalling civil war which seized the population unprepared. The peculiarity shared by who survived the conflict is their incredulity that war, violence and hatred could so suddenly erupt between neighbours and previously peace-loving citizens.
It seemed that in Europe the disgraceful and shocking veil of ethnic cleansing had been buried at the end of Nazism, or at least the brutal force with which it shattered our continent had been quashed. The Balcan wars proved the contrary and reminded us that the most dramatic tragedies can occur even in front of our own house door. The ill-omened event re-opened many wounds exposing once again the capacity of one group or individual to desire the annihilation of another.
Consequently, Western European countries, witnessed a flood of refugees seeking political asylum. Those of us who attended elementary and middle school in the ’90s can surely remember new children sitting in the classrooms, with strange names and different looks, speaking a language never heard before. We all knew of a war we’d seen on TV and we guessed they came from there. However, nobody knew what a war was nor what these children had gone through before entering the door of our classroom and sitting among us. Childish racism broke out against who couldn’t integrate immediately, who wasn’t fun at first sight. They would defend or ridicule themselves just to be recognised in the eyes of the others.
This work shows what happened to these children who escaped the conflict, yet brought with them memories of the atrocities of war, in all its different aspects. Children who, even if from different sides, all had something in common: that is, their struggle to make a new life in the country that first hosted them after their flight from their devastated homeland.
Twenty years from the last great European conflict, I Am Here Now reconstructed some of the stories of modern exiles which have by now lived the most part of their life in a country not of theirs and which had to reinvent an identity in an unknown place. They have blent into the moltitude of people living in Switzerland (and abroad) leaving the traces of their own past to vanish. Traces they carry inside, and one of the most intense experiences for human beings: war.
Discover more here
︎ iamherenow.ch
Funded by
FSRC/SRKS
RSI RETE DUE
Repubblica e Cantone Ticino - DECS
Dicastero servizi e attività sociali: Chiasso, culture in movimento
Migros Percento Culturale
Ufficio Federale della Migrazione - UFM
Servizio per lotta al razzismo - SLR
Ernst Göhner StiftungCittà di Bellinzona
︎
Past events
High school of Lugano 1,
Lugano, CH
4-8.5.2015
Teatro Il Foce
Lugao, CH
23 - 30.11.2014
site
Cantonal Library of Bellinzona
Bellinzona, CH
10.5 – 7.6.2014
Site
ChiassoLetteraria
Inauguration
Magazzini FFS, Chiasso
3-5.5.2013
Site