Klangweg Toggenburg
Ramon De Marco
Saturday 25 November — Presentations
14.00 — 14.30
The Klangweg is an extensive public hiking trail in an alpine environment in Switzerland’s Toggenburg region, for which Idee und Klang (my organisation) are overseeing the entire audio creation process. Hikers on this path will be able to discover a great number of sound art pieces created by various different artists. These are integrated into the soundsphere of the surrounding ecosystem and hereby function as its extension, sensitising visitors regarding its liability to sound pollution.
In a piece by landscape sound artist Ludwig Berger, for example, the trail will branch out into five different sections, each of which will feature a different kind of gravel with an individual grain size. When walking on each kind, the footsteps of hikers will create a sound that resembles the sound spectrum of a different kind of cricket. To mimic the crickets even more accurately, a visual score will help hikers imitate the rhythm of the animals’ clitter with their feet.
There are a few other art-pieces that deal with the subject of acoustic ecology, for example one by the Swiss artist Marcus Maeder, who will install a exploratory tent to examine the sounds of the soil. Or an installation by the Italian soundartist Marco Barotti, who installs some solar-driven woodpecker in the trees that will react on electro-smog. But there are also various installations that are dealing with the way we perceive acoustic landscape and sensitise our relation to it: Like ‚city in box‘, a piece by Paul DeMarinis, that places a box with car horns, sirens and buzzers inside into the idyllic landscape. Or a listening platform with chairs, from Austrian soundartist Peter Ablinger, which turns the surrounding nature into concert space and invites visitors to take a moment to listen consciously whats happing around them.
The new Klangweg will be opened in spring 2024 together with the Klanghaus Toggenburg.
Sound-installation ‚Inside / Outside‘
Friday 24 November — Listening sessions
19.00 – 20.45
The 8-channel sound-installation deals with the subject of Acoustic Ecology within Venice. The cubic sound setup becomes a gate to an extraordinary journey into another dimension of the Venice, as a listening experience but also as a way to question and reflect the way we treat this environment. The piece contributes to a sensitisation of the way we interact with the fragile habitat of the venetian lagoon and increases the appreciation for its beauty and diversity. Therefore, the negative influence of anthropological noise pollution is examined and experienced in a different way. The composition allows the city and its surrounding to be heard in places and at times where visitors normally cannot experience it - off the beaten tracks, at night, or on abandoned islands. Field-recordings done with a special 3D-microphone setup are carefully and musically interweaved to a journey that combines and contrasts simultaneously different auditive perspectives of the city and the surrounding lagoon – like day and night, overcrowded and abandoned or above and below the surface. But it also makes unusual perspectives audible: What happens outside of our hearing range or sounds that are hidden (e.g., underwater, etc.)?
The recordings where done in the context of a one month Pro Helvetia residency 2022 in Venice. The installation was presented at the Biennale Musica in Venice end of October 2023.
Bio
Ramon De Marco (born 1975) studied Audio Design at the Basel University of Music from 1995 to 2000. Afterwards he was in charge of the development of the Sound Design Studio at SRF Virus (Swiss National Radio). From 2001 he was project manager in the music department of Fabrica (Benetton's communication and research centre) in Treviso, Italy. In 2005 he founded Idee und Klang Audio Design together with Daniel Dettwiler. 2022 he founded the startup AUDIOBREEZE together with Peter Philippe Weiss. Ramon's work focuses on multidimensional compositions for spaces and intelligent sound designs for media productions. He realised international scenographic projects such as the BMW Museum in Munich, the First Wold War Galleries at the IWM London, the 'National Museum of Qatar’ in Doha or the awarded exhibition Sounds of Silence at the Museum of Communication in Bern.
As a sound artist he has also realised projects for various art exhibitions and festivals, such as the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the Outer Ear Festival in Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Experimenta Design in Lisbon and Klang Moor Schopfe in Gais (CH). In 2022 he was invited as Artist in Residence for Pro Helvetia in Venice. His work focuses on sound in space: Therefore he uses field-recordings as sources to study the condition of places and loudspeakers as musical instruments to produce spatiality under special acoustic conditions. Ramon also regularly gives lectures on sound scenography at international conferences. Since 2010 he has also been teaching sound design and acoustics at the Institute of Interior Design and Scenography at the FHNW in Basel and the FHGR in Chur (Switzerland) and is a guest lecturer at various other universities. In 2021 he published a book with the title: Sound Scenography - The Art of Designing Sound for Spaces.
