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Clemens Wenger: Start by Listening

About

On the forecourt of the Congress Centrum Alpbach (CCA) and on the village square, two listening stations will offer an opportunity to sharpen the sense of hearing. In the sight of Alpbachʼs Alpine backdrop and amid the densely paced hustle and bustle during the EFA, the pieces invite to reconsider the moment: „Listening versus Hearing“. Hearing means only the physical possibility of perceiving sound, whereas listening is about abstract recognition and classification of sound sources and sensual experience through conscious emotional evaluation. For the listening stations in Alpbach, our collective sound recordings (nature atmospheres, voice recordings of peopleʼs dialects, music bands and choirs in the countryside, music performances in public spaces in cities, noisy motorways and waterfalls, quiet forests and private spaces, etc.) are collaged into new compositions. Let us enjoy and practice listening as an important democratic tool in society! The art installation will be visible throughout the entire European Forum Alpbach 2022.

Clemens Wenger lives and works in Vienna as a musician and composer for contemporary jazz, pop, and electronic music. He initiated the “JazzWerkstatt Wien” and had been leading this musical collective since 18 years. He acts as head of the successful Viennese soul band “5/8erl in Ehr’n”. Most recently, Clemens has released “Physics of Beauty”, a collection of 32 musical pieces, as an interactive digital artwork, which has been internationally renowned in music and design media and impressively showcases his multi-faceted work.

Recordings by EFA Scholarship Holders
Additional Recordings by Clemens Wenger, Elisabeth Schack, Mina Modarressy
Technical Production by Gerald Roßbacher
Music by Clemens Wenger

Track List

75min total playing time

1. Albania, Tirana: Grand Park of Tirana - Minimal Clarinet Variations

2. Romania, Bucharest / Serbia, Belgrade / France, Penne d'Agenais / France, Nantes / North Macedonia, Skopje / Hungary, Budapest: Teleporation with Sound 1

3. India, Indore: Marriage function drums and sequencer

4. USA, San Francisco: Park, Street - Noise Stack

5. Netherlands, Groningen: Rowing on the Noord Willemskanaal - Accelerando Machine

6. Germany, Berlin: Street Music - Fat Bass Playalong

7. Ethiopia, Lalibela: Rain Jazz Worksong

8. Austria, Salzburg / Serbia, Novi Pazar: Cello Dorm & Call for Prayer Dialogue

9. Albania, Vlore: Sea meets microtonal iPad synthpads

10. Georgia, Tbilisi: Metro Calypso Impro

11. United Kingdom, Lewes: Surrounding and Piano dal niente

12. Nigeria, Kaduna: Gwong Gyashak Masquerade Dance - wait, a little slower for me please

13. Austria, Alpbach / France, Nantes / France, Penne d'Agenais / Serbia, Belgrade / Romania, Bucharest / Hungary, Budapest: Teleporation with Sound 2

14. Belgium, Brussels / Austria, Graz: Public Transport Mashup

15. North Madedonia, Tetovo / Austria, Alpbach: Kids playing in neighbourhood and in front of the Volksschule

16. Egypt, Cairo: Street - Car Horn Riff

17. Lesotho, Maseru: Mamokhorong - Happy Birthday Forum Alpbach

18. Belgium, Brussels: Rue D´Egmont Fake Doppler Effects

19. Belarus, Minsk: Rain with Grains and Strings

20. Albania, Tirana: City Filter Sweep Frequency Test

21. Austria, Alpbach: Churchbells á la Schrödinger Wave Function

22. Ukraine, Lutsk: Recording of 06.29.2022

23. Cameroon, Yaounde / Austria, Alpbach: Rural Area and Alpine Birds Study

24. France, Paris: Street Music animates Clemens to play piano instead of working

25. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Dos Prazeres Costa Carnaval Loop Playalong that ends with car horn from Cairo

26. Bangladesh, Sunamganj: Rainfall and synthesized ceiling mobiles

27. Albania, Tirana: Family in a Room dissolves

28. Romania, Timisoara / Italy, Iseo Lake: Pub and Birds Techno Acid

29. Austria, Graz: Wind, filtered and meditated

30. Croatia, Rijeka / Greece, Crete: Crowded Beach with a surpise meeting of the famous mamokhorong playing in the beach radio

31. Alpbach, Dorferbach / Ethiopia, Addis Abba: Creek Intro - Choral Music and Electric Piano Improvisation

32. France, Nantes: Bus in Place du Cirque shatters into rhythm

33. Poland, Warsaw: City fountain and turntable electric noise

34. France, Paris: Metro reminds me of Einstürzende Neubauten

35. Austria, Alpbach: Kids at Volksschule and Grassland Silence

36. Romania, Bucharest / Armenia, Yerevan / USA, San Francisco / Netherlands, Utrecht / Austria, Alpbach / Italy, Ischia / France, Penne d'Agenais: Teleporation with Sound 3

37. Iraq, Baghdad: Car in traffic jam becomes a car horn concerto, presto

38. France, Nantes: Downtown Music - everybody sing that melody!

39. North Macedonia, Skopje / Austria, Alpbach: Folklore Festival meets the Alpbach Choirs Rehearsal

40. Uganda, Kampala: Public transport bike, very concrète hommage à early electronic music

41. United Arab Emirates, Dubai / Austria, Graz: Metro & Tram - Styrian Trap Fantasy

42. Montenegro, Budva / Austria, Alpbach: Sea Waves distorting dark bells mystery netflix remix

43. Kosovo, Prishtina: Urban chaos and neighboorhood dive DEEP

44. Norway, Stavanger / Georgia, Tbilisi: Food festival shares piano with bus station

Start by Listening in Concert | 23 August 2022, 5.30 pm

Piano improvisations over the recordings of the EFA Scholarship Holders from all over the world.

Surprise! Open up your sensen and let yourself be inspired. In case of bad weather we will try to reschedule it.

Clemens Wenger - piano & electronics . www.clemenswenger.com

Theresa Hattinger: The Common Separation

About

With her installation The Common Separation, Theresa Hattinger invites you to keep on questioning your own decisions and associations. As a multidisciplinary designer and artist, she is convinced that opinions are rather more a question of socialisation than the result of a conscious decision. A guidance system is used to divide important access routes at the Congress Centrum Alpbach and in the village into two separate ones, using what seem to be two opposites. Despite all its visibility, the intervention is subtle and cheerfully invokes a clear design language that feigns authority and inescapability. Even so, a decision must be made, either in favour of one side or the other. The seven-part public-space installation is complemented by two mirrored textile sculptures in the village square and in front of the Congress Centrum Alpbach. These enter into a dialogue with the sound collage “Start By Listening” and capture the faces of contemplators while they are listening. The (Commonly Not) Separated are somewhat dependent on each other, nestled into their surroundings and allowed be touched. The art installation will be visible throughtout the entire European Forum Alpbach 2022.

Theresa Hattinger is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who works with typography, textiles, space, and drawings. Primarily, her work takes place in public spaces and ranges from minimal interventions up to projects that extend through entire cities. In the last years, she displayed her works in Vienna, St. Pölten, Leipzig, and Havana and collaboratively worked on stage design for experimental, performative theatre and urban exploration projects. She also published a children’s book and lives and works in Vienna.

Credits

Curation: Yana Barinova, Elisabeth Schack (EFA22)
Coordination: Lina Barinova, Theresa Czerny (EFA22)
Print: Felix Leutner; special thanks to Foto Leutner
Graphics: Madeleine Schmidt

Maria Craffonara: The World in the Village | Choir Concert | 28 August 2022, 6pm

What would the future sound like if it were a tune? The musician Maria Craffonara composed the commissioned work "The World in the Village" especially for various Alpbach Choirs. Just as a village brings the concept of community to life on a local level, Europe does so multinational. Let’s intertwine both: local and global sounds and a lot of joy to celebrate Europe through music.

Maria Craffonara is a vocalist and violinist with internationally renowned ensembles, such as the quartet “Donauwellenreiter” and her duo with cellist Rina Kaçinari, with whom she will be performing this year in Alpbach. Next to performing she has gained recognition for her teaching work as a vocal coach, with a focus on choirs, for her work as choirmaster and as a songwriter and arranger. 

Credits

Composition and Rehearsal Maria Craffonara 
Performance by Local Alpbach Choirs

Concert Rina Kaçinari and Maria Craffonara | 31 August 2022, 8.30pm

Join us this evening for a special occasion in Alpbach’s village centre and experience the two musicians, composers, lyricists and interpreters extraordinaire Rina Kaçinari (Cello, Vocals) and Maria Craffonara (Violin, Vocals) – both internationally successful in several ensembles – draw on the remarkable wealth of their musical worlds for their 1st Alpbach Concert, combining passion and humour.

Rina Kaçinari

The cellist and improvisation artist Rina Kaçinari played with the Ulrich Drechsler Cello Quartet, Nataša Mirković and Matthias Loibner and was co-founder of the duo Catch-Pop String-Strong, which lasted until 2017. The duo won the Austrian World Music Awards Promotion Prize in 2011, the Ö1 Pasticcio Prize in 2012, and the Fraunhofer Volksmusik Prize in 2013. She currently plays in a duo with singer and violinist Maria Craffonara.

Maria Craffonara

She is a vocalist and violinist with internationally renowned ensembles, such as the quartet “Donauwellenreiter” and her duo with cellist Rina Kaçinari, with whom she will be performing this year in Alpbach. Next to performing she has gained recognition for her teaching work as a vocal coach, with a focus on choirs, for her work as choirmaster and as a songwriter and arranger.

220822 113912 efa22 sem working together c EFA Elisabeth Mandl

Still Listening | 27 August, 12-12.30pm and 1 September, 3pm

The Arts Scholars from RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and their mentor Nona Shepphard have worked up a short piece over the week in response to Clemens Wenger’s sound installation “Start By Listening”. The word “listening” was mentioned in many of the opening speeches as being something vital and listening with the whole body is something that is seminal in actor training. Come by, open up your senses and let yourself be inspired.

Yana Barinova: /SPALENA/

About

Why does humanity repeatedly fall into barbarism, why do some groups of people enslave themselves to totalitarian systems, and why do they lose any sense of their basic compassion? Why do society and nature so often contradict each other? Theodor Adorno

Unfortunately, nowadays these questions are once again critically relevant.

For almost six months Ukraine has been at war, which was started by the horrific Russian aggression with its absurd cruelty. Lives are being taken away, our cities and villages are being demolished, infrastructure, homes, cultural monuments, educational institutions, and

temples are being destroyed. Nature is being senselessly decimated by military attacks. Fields and forests are being burned, our fruitful chernozems, seas, and coastlines are being mined. Our language is being exterminated.

The consequences of killing Ukraine's nature have already reached a global dimension, and if military attacks continue, they could cause irreversible changes. The area of fires is steadily increasing, the temperature of the external environment is heating up, and fires in nuclear power plants also threaten to increase the radiation level. Destruction of agricultural crops has already raised concerns of famine in many countries, as has Ukraine's restrictions on grain exports. It turns out that the planet is not so big. Indeed, we are all highly interconnected.

Within four months of this war, three million hectares of Ukrainian forests were destroyed. 1,654,736 hectares of continuous steppes and 1,236,306 hectares of natural biosphere reserves found themselves in the zone of military combat action. As a result, the century-old Askania Nova and the unique nature park of Kinburn Spit, the place where thousands of plants and animals inscribed on the Red List were preserved, have been wiped out. This results in 44% of Ukraine's protected areas being engulfed in war.

This year's photo exhibition, which will be on display as part of the European Forum Alpbach, carries the title /SPALENA/ and serves as a reminder that Russian invaders are not only ruthlessly destroying human lives, villages and cities of Ukraine, but also eradicating Ukraine's unique wildlife and nature. Considering Ray Bradbury's Butterfly Effect and the idea that the death of even one butterfly can cause devastating consequences elsewhere in the world sometime in the future. And now, in the middle of Europe, there is a war that has already taken away, figuratively speaking, millions of butterflies... Thousands have been killed, tortured, and are now missing. Millions of Ukrainians have become migrants, who have lost their homes and peaceful lives. Not by coincidence, the photographs are to be displayed amidst the Austrian landscapes, so beautiful and peaceful, breathtaking and colourful. It underscores the truth of this dreadful war, which is not so far away. Which is very close. The kind of truth that can render speechless.

Curator´s Quote by Yana Barinova

Credits

Curation: Yana Barinova, Elisabeth Schack (EFA22)
Coordination: Lina Barinova, Theresa Czerny (EFA22)
Print: Felix Leutner; special thanks to Foto Leutner
Graphics: Madeleine Schmidt

Artists' Bios

Esteban Biba
Esteban Biba is a Guatemalan photojournalist since 15 years, his work has been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and El País in Spain. He has worked for some of the most important written media in his country and is currently a staff photographer for EFE international agency and a contributor for European Pressphoto Agency (EPA). In recent years he has covered human migration of the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) to the United States and made an exhibition on the subject together with the International Organization for Migration of the United Nations. Within Guatemala, he has followed and documented the cultural and religious traditions of ethnic groups throughout the country. His work has led him to photograph high risk events such as storms, floods, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters. He is also the author of the book "Shoot and Then Smile" - a series of chronicles on the job of police reporting in journalism and the risks of exercising the profession from an early age in Latin America.

Mstyslav Chernov
Mstislav is a Ukrainian international journalist and writer born in eastern Ukraine in 1985. For the past six years, the photographer has been working on major projects in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Visited more than 40 countries of the world. He began his career as a photo reporter at the MediaPort news agency. Since 2014, he has been a journalist with the international news agency Associated Press. He also participated in projects for the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international public organizations. His photographs have been published in the NY Times, Washington Post, Independent, Telegraph, Le Monde, Die Zeit, BBC, Forbes, Dailymail. The videos are on BBC, CNN, AL JAZEERA, EURONEWS, SKY NEWS channels. Twice he became the winner of the most prestigious European award Royal Television Society in the field of television journalism, winner of the international Rory Peck Award and RTS as operator of the year, repeated winner of the "Photographer of the Year" competition in the nominations of documentary and reportage photography. He is the Founder and CEO of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP)— an NGO that brings together the best professional photographers in Ukraine. Teaches and creates advanced programs in the field of documentary photography and videography.

Finbarr O’Reilly
Finbarr O'Reilly is an independent Irish-Canadian visual journalist and author who has spent the last 20 years working in conflict zones and complex humanitarian emergencies. He has won numerous industry awards, including the World Press Photo of the Year (2006), World Press Photo First Place Portrait (2019), and an Emmy Award (2020). He is the Laureate of the 2020 Carmignac Photojournalism Award and a Canon Ambassador. He was the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition photographer in 2019 and worked with the International Criminal Court for the "Life After Conflict" exhibition at the UN in New York in July 2022.

Yurii Horskyi
Yurii Horskyi is a Ukrainian army soldier who has been serving in the defence of Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014. He lost one of his legs during the military hostilities, however, upon his rehabilitation, he started to advocate for sports such as long jumping and shot putting among people with prosthetics. Yurii has never lost his spirit. What makes his photograph unique is that right after it was taken, Yurii returned to his battalion and continued fighting for the freedom and independence of Ukraine. Despite his earlier injuries, in February 2022 Yurii decided to re-join the Ukrainian Armed Forces to defend his country.

Yana Barinova
Yana Barinova (born in Odessa in 1989) is a social activist and former COO of Babin Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. Her key areas of activity are the promotion of public dialogue on human rights in order to contribute to peace. Yana Barinova has authored more than 100 articles on constitutional human rights, cultural policy, as well as on the policies of memory. Yana Barinova defended her doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in November 2020. In 2017, Yana Barinova participated in the leadership seminar of The Aspen Institute Kyiv, and in 2018, completed a Fundraising Management Program at New York University. In 2018, Yana also served an adviser to the Minister of Culture and Information Policy on reforms in the field of preservation and protection of the cultural heritage of Ukraine. Yana Barinova graduated from the Ukrainian School of Political Studies in 2021, which is an educational network designed to improve the culture of public policy in Ukraine. Shortly after, she took on the role of the Director of the Department of Culture in Kyiv. She is currently working for the ERSTE Foundation as a Project Manager for European Policy and Ukrainian Relations.

BURNING WHEAT FIELD

Photographer: Mstyslav Chernov
UAAP - Ukrainian Association Of Professional Photographers

BURNT HARVEST

Photographer: Yurii Horskyi
UAAP - Ukrainian Association Of Professional Photographers

FRONT LINES

Photographer: Finbarr O'Reilly
UAAP - Ukrainian Association Of Professional Photographers