Feld

Speakers, 3D printed sound reflectors, amplifier, 8-channel media player

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Thomas Aurin

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

For his work Feld (Field), Robert Lippok has ventured into the surrounding area to lay a sonic net that stretches between the functional buildings of the marina and the ruins of the monastery.

To create it he lodged twelve woofers in the ground, installing them in the landscape in a way that creates an asymmetrical field to the right and left of the path. Instead of an enclosure defined by fences or barriers, this field is marked out by the magnetism of Lippok’s soundscape. A field refers to a cultivated landscape, historically it was the symbol of humans settling down and establishing agrarian communities. This is one aspect of Lippok’s inspiration for this work. Through the components of its structure, the renatured landscape of La Certosa tells the story of its continuous transformation by man.

Lippok’s “field” is not a natural meadow, instead it once served as the foundation for monastery buildings and later for military installations. During its centuries of monastic use, the island was also home to bustling agricultural activity. In his work, Robert Lippok interrogates this earth that has been plowed up several times over the centuries and gives a voice to the layers of the past. His work opens up a space beneath the surface that blends with the island's natural soundscape.

No landscape, no future is without its preconditions – Lippok imparts a contemporary presence to the historical consciousness of the island's idyllic landscape. Sound recordings of the empty German Pavilion have also been incorporated into his work. Together with the religious and military history of the island, they compose the associative raw material for the work.

While the earth in the pavilion is the central motif of this act of overwriting, with his work Lippok inscribes himself into the terrestrial structure of the island. His work is not a single-point soil sample, but rather an electroacoustic field experiment that makes the present tangible as a threshold between past and future. Like the repeatedly overwritten layers of earth on the island, every palimpsest holds a promise: that nothing is lost for good, and yet something new can be created on the same ground.