Lorelei

sound sculpture
continuous loop of 'Songs of the Humpback Whale' (1970), played through a modified oil barrel and metal pipes

Nestled in the secret corners of a Berlin community garden, Lorelei sings the ballads of whales -- giving hollow, resonating, discarded industrial materials new life through sound. Distant echoes of whale song arise from the depths of an oil barrel, bearing a wide spectrum of floating frequencies that resonate within the metal enclosure, highs and lows and glissandos elongated as if to immortalize vibrations translated into feeling -- a language derived from pure gestural tone.

Our sensual underwater world is threatened by the ever-expanding shadow of a cancerous enterprise marked by growth for the sake of growth, the ultimate breeding machine, a toxic global economy that thrives on infinite consumption and destruction. What lies beneath is a big black mass lurking in the shadows, a future ridden with industrial filth, with the potential to swallow up entire oceans and digest them into distant memories made of sound, apparitions of a floating world once very much alive now crying from the bottom of a barrel. The future is looking back at us through memories. She croons in mourning as if to herald her inevitable demise.