Interview with Mariko Takahashi & Stefan Winter

İhsan Dindar made an interview with Mariko Takahashi and Stefan Winter about their project Neue Klangkunst, which will be performed in Karbon/Arter.

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How do you prefer to express this multi-layered performance?

Sound Art offers a variety of artistic forms of play for which the traditional vocabulary of music, recording art, opera, theatre and visual art is no longer sufficient. We are not interested in replacing or questioning these genres, but in creating compositions, installations and performances from the combination of elements of various art forms.

As we can understand from the name of the project, there is a reference to Beethoven. At this point, how do you establish the Beethoven connection with the project?

Beethoven’s compositions, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and Dante’s Divine Comedy are culpable for this work. Ludwig van’s compositions are of particular importance as they are adapted for this work by composer Fumio Yasuda. Ludwig van’s work is influenced by the social revolutions of his time. He is filled with freedom, equality and brotherhood. But his music, unfortunately, is often abused. Abused in the past by National Socialism and still today by totalitarian systems. It is a tragedy, Beethoven unintentionally becomes the hero of tyrants, although his work is filled with the spirit of the enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Beethoven’s music has great emotional impact on the listener, which can be exploited commercially, but this is not a decision-making factor for us, we have always refused to get involved in the music industry. In his music is the constant presence of the enlightenment, the key to our future. Only enlightenment and equality can prevent the mutilation and destruction of all humankind.

Beethoven was a name that objected to many things and defying the emperors during his lifetime. When we look at today, there are many events that require humanity to stand up. One of them is the tragedy of immigrants. I think the essence of your work is this topic…

October 3, 2013 was the trigger for this work. Off the coast of the island of Lampedusa, a 20-meter cutter loaded with about 545 refugees from Somalia and Eritrea sank, coming from the Libyan port city of Misrata. Local fishermen rescued 155 survivors. 366 people were confirmed to have died. Memories of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa come to mind. Just as Géricault engaged in conversations with survivors of the 1816 shipwreck, we spoke with survivors from 2013. At the beginning of our work, we could not have known that the deaths of many refugees simply trying to survive would not remain an isolated incident. But it is not only about this tragedy, but fundamentally about the tragedy of us humans, the war of man against man and man against nature.

Art is in an important position to raise awareness about preventing these tragedies from happening. From this point of view, what message or stance does the performance display?

(Sound) art is a mirror of our culture. Our work is not meant to be a political or social call. We do not want to proclaim a political manifesto, but we hope through our work to trigger in the recipient his/her own memories, feelings and fantasies. There is no expectation, but the freedom of thought.

Nine moods are used as themes in your performance. What kind of metaphorical meaning is there?

In our video-works the dancer Aki Tsujita becomes a living sculpture embodying nine allegories: creation, finiteness, beauty, forlornness, flight, search, powerlessness, hatred, desolation.

I think you are in Istanbul for the first time with such a layered musical project. What are you feeling?

We appreciate and love Istanbul. We had a grant from the Kunststiftung NRW years ago and spent months in Istanbul, wandering the city every day even in the rain or snow with a microphone and capturing the noises of the city. With the help and collaboration of the great accordionist Muammer Ketencoğlu, we recorded music from this melting pot Istanbul and released this on our label Winter & Winter. We have also recorded compositions by Fazıl Say with Ferhan & Ferzan Önder, and Ferhan & Ferzan will play leading roles in the world premiere on December 15 and 16 in Arter. It is incredibly exciting to be here. Istanbul is giving us rich gifts and we are grateful and happy that the first performance in front of an audience will take place here.

What will be the fate of the project in the next period? Or will it leave its place to other works?

The Ninth Wave – Ode To Nature will be screened at ZIFF (Zanzibar International Film Festival) next summer. Further screenings in Europe, for example in Prague, are being planned.

Your exhibition titled Sound Art Triptych will be simultaneously in Istanbul. Finally, can we get some information about this subject?

At Millî Reasürans Sanat Galerisi in Şişli, we are showing various sound artworks until January 14. Among them a 3-channel video and 8-channel sound installation of The Ninth Wave. But we also show there the monumental work Poem of a Cell – Triptych of Love and Ecstasy (2017). We hope that the audience will literally allow themselves to fall into our sounds and films, lie down, release the tension of the body and enter another world.