We usually perceive changes in urban spaces with visual means – through photographs, pictures or maps. But you can also hear the changing of a city. “Slušaj Savamala” is a sound-art project which collects old and new sounds and which will feed them back into the urban space in formats such as installations, concerts, or radio programmes.

Team:

Klara Schilliger, Lara Stanić, Valerian Maly, Cyrill Lim (GingerEnsemble)

SLUŠAJ SAVAMALA! is a sound art project that incubates the Belgrade district Savamala with sound from Savamala: The GingerEnsemble – in cooperation with Miroslav Savić and guests – have set off on a kind of journey of discovery “with their ears perked up”. The district of Savamala has been subjected to a forensic investigation of sound. Specific sounds have been collected and transformed in several interlocking compositional processes in the incubator – a media lab that was temporarily set up on the site – into a sound happening that grows and proliferate simultaneously over the course of several months, to be set free again in Savamala. Radio offers the perfect platform for this. A broadcasting station was set up to cover the district with a fixed broadcasting frequency and establish itself during the course of the project with public interventions, such as, for example, public listening events. The primary aim was not to produce conventional format radio or continuous airplay, but to create the possibility of using the radio station as a kind of stage or platform with preannounced events.

Over the course of the nine months, the radio program fed with content in the form of features, soundscapes, compositions, live broadcasts and special reports. Thematically, oriented on Rudolf Archibald Reiss. Reiss (1875 – 1929) was a pioneer in the development of forensic science, a journalist, chemist and professor at the University of Lausanne where he founded the “Institute of Police Science”. On invitation from the Serbian government, in 1915, he researched and documented Austro-Hungarian war crimes in Serbia during the First World War. The rumors and stories of Savamala have been researched and investigated with microphone and forensic reasoning. Savamala – city district of bygone beauty – was a subjected to an autopsy and recorded as a radio feature. L’oreille extérieure – l’oreille intérieure Based on the “oeil extérieur”, a common term in the theatrical context – the view from outside, as a dramaturgical accompaniment, not as something involved in the production – we direct our ears to the city district of Savamala. L’oreille intérieure Media artists, sound artists, composers and musicians have develop works in Savamala whth SLUŠAJ SAVAMALA!

Local artists in particular have been invited to participate. In order for this process to function largely autonomously, we have involved Miroslav Savić, who, with his contacts and experiences as a Belgrade composer, is a valuable collaborating partner.