Sounds against Silence
Stadt hören und sehen
Ternitz, Austria
2014
Ternitz was as known for the red cloud - as it was for being Steel City. This cloud of smoke that arose during steel tapping, distributed its red dust over the whole city, depending on the wind.
A special feature of Ternitz today are the eleven volunteer fire departments that contribute significantly to the identification and community education in their respective district. For Etwas Rotes all fire departments drive in a parade through the city towards the the factory site. In a performative ritual a red cloud is ignited at the spot where once stood the now blasted furnaces. The Ternitz film and video club that documented important events in the city for more than fifty years, documents the staging, and bring the recordings to the city archive. The population is called upon to document the event and also to transfer the photos to the city archive. So that the red cloud will be enrolled in the new Ternitzer history in a collective act.
Etwas Rotes was made with the volunteer firefighters St. Johann, Sieding, Rohrbach, Raglitz, Putzmannsdorf, Pottschach, Mahrersdorf, Flatz, Dark Stone, Döppling and firefighting Schoeller-Bleckmann & Partners, and film and video club Ternitz.
Sounds against Silence is curated by Christina Nagele as a scenario that unfolds not only by the visible elements but also by relevant absences. The semi-urban texture of Ternitz has much in common with other peripheries around major cities. But Ternitz is not originally an urban organism, but an amalgam of former villages, whose real geographical center is a factory site; the steel factory that once marked a noticeable center is now lost since its closure in the '80s, and with this, qualities of the former village seem to have lost too. This absence was the starting point for considering Sounds against Silence. The project raises the question of how to produce echoes and resonances from the history of Ternitz as a steel city with artistic means to establish lines of communication in the present and towards the future. The characteristic images and sounds of industrial work, forming the (sound)scape of Ternitz and are just as important as the question of the direction in which the post-industrial Ternitz orients itself today, as the term 'work' and the way in which work is still visible or audible today, has changed. The Absent is the material for a fragmentary score of artistic interventions, for a re-performance of historical findings.
