Distant Voices took place in an overgrown, sunken garden. As the audience walked along the paths, they triggered voices speaking out of the ground.
with the recorded voices of:
Donald Arsem, Kay Arsem, Barbara Beisinghoff, Christian Berg, Gertrude Berg, Moritz Dornauf, Anjali Göbel, Hsu Pao-Lien, Toni Kitanovski, Cathy Nolan, Aniece Novak, Mari Novotny-Jones, Tom Plsek, Ute Ritschel, Katharina Sommer, Bart Uchida, and Jutta Weymann.
and daily action by Marilyn Arsem
assisted by Katharina Sommer
Distant Voices was created as a companion piece to Hidden Views, an installation that I created for the 1999 Vogelfrei festival. The artworks in the festival are sited in private gardens throughout a neighborhood in Darmstadt, Germany. Both these works were nearly invisible, and required close attention in order to be discovered.
My garden for ‘Distant Voices’ was one of the sites furthest away from the center of the festival activities. The audience descended through an archway into a sunken garden, surrounded by hedges and overhanging trees. Sections of large rhododendrons screened other parts of the garden from view. It had a slightly abandoned feeling, an eerie sense of isolation.
Throughout the garden I buried small audio speakers. As the audience moved down the paths, they triggered voices speaking out of the ground. The voices were very quiet, so it was necessary to bend down, bend close to the earth in order to hear what was being said. The voices spoke from another world. They were describing, in the first person, present tense, the Afterlife, as if they were already there. “Be careful where you step, I’m all in pieces here…” The voice would reach a pause in its thoughts, and there would be silence, but as soon as the listener moved away, it would start speaking again, continuing. The voices spoke in German, English, French, Macedonian and Chinese.
Each day that the exhibition was open I also worked in the garden, restoring the leaves of the plants back to the full green of summer. Working with water-based paints, I meticulously matched the colors of the leaves and painted any brown ones back to green. If the leaves had any tears or holes, I carefully repaired them with matching thread. Evidence of the work was hard to detect without watching me directly, but I am convinced that there was a very subtle shift in the garden, reversing the advance of autumn, reversing time.
Seventeen people agreed to be recorded, imagining themselves already dead. It was not an easy request to make, nor was it easy to do. While most of them thought that they knew what they would say, it generally progressed into unexpected territory. This was especially true for people who entered a kind of dream state, lying down with their eyes closed as they spoke. I continue to make these recordings as part of an ongoing project on our concepts of the Afterlife.
DISTANT VOICES
descending into the garden
paths circle and converge
shadows shift
leaves shiver
as a breath slips through the air
a whisper of time past
time to come
