Theresa Schütz

Over a period of four weeks a large number of bowls will be made out of clay at the water basin in front of the Hansa Library: Available Forms – Verhandelte Spielräume(Available Forms – negotiated latitudes)is an instrument that creates a musical theme out of openness. Aside from water, clay and hands, cleaning up the square in the evening and the support of volunteer helpers, little else is needed. A mobile tool trolley will be used to distribute the bowls around the neighbourhood to dry in waterproof cases.

Participation in the three weekend workshops with a composer requires a greater level of commitment. These will take place in the same timeframe and will work with the bowls to develop a collective composition. The audio composition will be inspired by experimental forms of musical notation from the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the eponymous work “Available Forms” by Earle Brown, which was created at the same time as the Hansaviertal was built. In the fourth week, on the occasion of European Heritage Day (celebrated in Germany as the Day of the Open Monument) as well as the anniversary celebrations for “100 years of Bauhaus”, the performance will be held with the growing open ensemble. Using hydrophones and underwater loudspeakers as well as loudspeakers and microphones at the edge of the water basin, the sound will be switched back and forth between the two acoustically autonomous worlds, becoming physically distorted in the process. The submerged sounds from the underwater world will be transmitted to the surface, where they will be recorded and played back through the other loudspeakers, in a symbolic interplay of the strange and familiar.

The proposal stems from thinking about security in the open city. Even at the International Building Exhibition in 1957 the idea of the open city played a prominent role. In the reality of living together, however, openness creates ambivalences, spaces that are open and closed at the same time. As a result, positive moments of societal change that bring diversity with them may be experienced as unsettling. The subjective and societal experience of insecurity feeds on the security discourse of politicians and the media, and spreads through everyday life as the spoken word. Talking about fear materializes physically in public space. The creation of security goes hand in hand with cleanliness and orderliness and is achieved through all number of spatial restrictions. In Available Forms - Verhandelte Spielräume by contrast, conflicts are regarded as a constitutive quality of urban public space and are used as an opportunity to instigate processes of negotiation.