APPLAUS
Audio loop, sound system with eight loudspeakers, metal plaque, posters.
Munich Main Railway Station
2019
The site-specific sound installation re-echoed the applause that greeted refugee’s arrival in 2015 and GDR migrants arrival in 1989, both at the Starnberg Wing Station of the Munich Hbf. The project APPLAUS focused on rethinking the act of the ‘applause’ taking under consideration the political situation nowadays, the rise of the extreme right wing and the deportations that have already taken place. How can we perceive this applause today? The installation suggested to re-experience the welcoming incident at a moment that the Munich MainTrain Station is being demolished waiting for the new building to take its place. A metal plaque that forms part of the installation will remain at the building of the Starnberg Wing, until its demolition.
Exhibition duration: 11.05 – 11.06.2019
Part of the CITY OF MUNICH’S PUBLIC ART PROGRAMME ‘FREQUENCIES: Acoustic dimensions of the city’
Funded by the City of Munich Department of Arts & Culture
With the kind support of Deutsche Bahn
Credits:
Sound design by Claudia Wroński
Sound system installation by Galli & Schmidt
Introductory text by Gürsoy Doğtaş
Project texts overseen by Kyriacos Karseras
Graphic design by YOOOP Studio
Special thanks
to Giorgia Aquilar, Katja Aßmann, Andrea Binke, Babylonia Constantinides, the Bavarian Refugee Council, Sofia Bempeza, Jakob Berger, Stella Chronopoulou, Afroditi Festa, Ralf Homann, Martin Klemp & the Auer Weber architectural office, Leonidas Kourmadas, Yorgos Kourmadas, Dimitrij Lakatos, Anja Lückenkemper, Markus Galli, the Migrant’s Advisory Board Munich, the Munich Refugee Council, the Munich Volunteers – We Help Association, Refugees Welcome to Munich (YouTube account), Natalia Santori, Claudia Schnopp, Nathalie Schönberger, Vassiliea Stylianidou, Camille Tricaud, Franz Wanner and Sophie Wolfrum, and to my 2016 master’s programme students at the Technical University of Munich for first bringing the 1989 arrival of GDR internal migrants at the Starnberg Wing Station to my attention.
Exhibition text by Gürsoy Doğtaş:
Encore
Those who flee seek to be as quiet as possible. Refugees do not want to draw attention. They often bide their time silently in hiding to avoid life-threatening danger. A loud round of applause – a radical acoustic gesture – marked the end of their flight in September 2015. People from Munich, who had gathered behind barriers in the Starnberg Wing Station of the city’s Hauptbahnhof (main railway station), applauded the refugees arriving from Syria and Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. Years earlier, similar scenes unfolded at the same location under very different historical circumstances. In November 1989, citizens of East Germany (the GDR) were also welcomed with applause.
Clapping hands – a wordless gesture easily understood by all – greeted the refugees and internal migrants, congratulating them on their survival and welcoming them as potential new fellow residents of Munich. This applause cast them as heroic athletes or adored actors. But with their ovations, audiences are always also celebrating themselves: in the case of September 2015 and November 1989, as an empathetic, cosmopolitan and tolerant society. The euphoric mood was later to subside, this culture of welcome gradually morphing into fear and rejection.
Munich-based artist and architect Sofia Dona isolated audio of this applause from video recordings of the events and arranged it in a loop to be used in her site-specific sound installation APPLAUS. Eight loudspeakers re-echo these outbursts of enthusiasm around the main hall and portico of the Starnberg Wing Station. APPLAUS does not restage specific scenes of some bygone welcoming culture but rather traces the imprint – the acoustic contour – of an absent event. The installation lets the recollective presence of a past resonate anew, creating a web of auditory connections between time, space and bodies.
Like an acoustic archaeology of historical events, APPLAUS excavates two historical layers of auditory space just a few years before this controversial piece of monumental neoclassical post-war architecture – designed by Heinrich Gerbl and protected as a listed monument since 2010 – is set to be demolished to make way for a new building. The swelling volume of the clapping hands, the rhythm and tempo of those events, acoustically pervade the architectural space as in an echo chamber. The expressive qualities of the station as a performance space are also simultaneously put to the test. Whereas the applause was originally for the refugees and internal migrants, APPLAUS reverses its direction: it is now passers-by who are acclaimed by clapping hands, as if they are performers.
Applause usually heightens a joy that is already there, drowning out all other moods. APPLAUS, on the other hand, has us prick up our ears when the applause dies away. Voices that are silent or weak, that go unheard, are thus brought into the public arena. Sofia Dona’s sound intervention examines both the threats and the exclusionary mechanisms posed by a narrowing urban and national populace and their conceptions of identity. Her audio loop seeks to slip the silenced stories of migrants and refugees back into the public discourse. APPLAUS defends voices dismissed as mere noise and demands their “place in the symbolic order of the community of speaking beings”.
A plaque commemorating the refugees of 2015 and internal migrants of 1989 will be installed inside the Starnberg Wing Station as part of APPLAUS.
Sofia Dona’s project will also be complemented by posters pasted onto advertising pillars throughout Munich, thus transporting the events of both November 1989 and September 2015 deep into the city, and establishing a link back to the wing station set to disappear during the course of ongoing redevelopment works.