Moving into the emptiness and the detritus of past labors, the quiet stirs with its own unique tonality. It is a hushed, embedded tone that speaks to histories of industry, communities of migrants, the daily humdrum of a workforce. In what ways do such histories resound within the present? What kinds of stories do they offer or hold? What becomes of the lost or forgotten voices? And in what sense do they stitch themselves into the harsh fabric of metal and stone, the walls and structures of abandoned architectures?
These are questions and wonderings prompted by the work of Zorka Wollny, whose practice engages with questions of community, marginalized voices, the left-over buildings and forgotten stories populating landscapes shaped by Capitalism. These are points of concern within Wollny’s oeuvre that give way to a sonic practice filled with ghosts. Yet, the hauntological dimension is never fixated solely on the lingering traces of a past forgotten. Rather, Wollny tracks the uneasy fault lines separating past and present, loss and agency, margin and center. Through collective and communal processes, participatory sounding and musical composition, the material configurations of time and space are reoriented along an axis of sonic energy.
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What are the consequences of such reorientations? What becomes of the matters of time and space, of architecture and labor, from within a framework of sound and music? Wollny’s Resonance Assembly—Composition for a Factory (2014) offers an entry into the artist’s methods and concerns. In it, musicians move through an abandoned Berlin factory, producing sounds with instruments, found objects and other materials, as well as with their voices and bodies. Forming an ambulatory, compositional collective, their sonic gestures animate the disused space which, as the artist suggestively states, comes to bestow “an acoustic presence to the factory’s quiet erosion and untold stories.”1
Resonance Assembly gives expression to the possibility of reworking the contours and delineations of the factory space, and the materiality of things around, by utilizing sound and acoustics as energising forces. The punctuations of percussed objects and the resounding vocal reverberations filling the rooms evoke another spatial-temporal dimension. Within Wollny’s work, resonance emerges as an acoustic means for engaging with the specifics of place. It figures an oscillation situated between understanding and musical rapture; between fixity and aliveness; between history and presence. A type of generative re- or disorientation arises through such performative, acoustic collaborations, destabilising time and space to draw out other ways of inhabiting a given environment. It’s as if sound reaches into the shadows to incite new partnerships, stirring the silence to amplify new narratives.
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What emerges in Wollny’s works are not only ritualistic reverberations of sound in derelict space, but an improbable community that gathers as sound passes across subjects and objects, people and things. Resonance Assembly is an assembly not only of human agents or performers. In the billowing and meandering resonances that come to energize the factory, material fixity of the space is diffracted beyond itself. Into a ghosted dimension of haunted ambience? Or, a reworking of the hard structures of industry by way of a new vibrancy?
The improbable community found in Resonance Assembly figures against the backdrop of physical labor that formerly took place in a structure of Capitalism; the factory as a historical site of material production. While histories of music in the workplace are often directed at the instrumentalization of labor and enhancing the capacity to work efficiently over long stretches, Resonance Assembly creates an altogether different experience. Here, music weakens one’s sense of productivity. It is the music of dreaming, of meditation, where one may attune to the hidden or affective dimensions underpinning the metabolism of the body and reclaim its power as one of poetic force.
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Against the understanding of space as defined by material boundaries, and that figures an image of community as belonging to a set of identifiable borders, Resonance Assembly is suggestive for notions of trespass by communities that do not belong. Rather, they forage and occupy, gathering temporarily and gleaning from left-over resources to construct a creative life from the discarded matter of the industrious, who, like ghosts, remain a community hidden in that process.
Might such communities and practices shift an understanding of public life from that of discourse and deliberation to embodied feeling and shared imagination – what Alphonso Lingis highlights as “the empirical”?2 The improbable community emerging from Wollny’s work invites such rethinking. It does this by shifting attention from the public square to minor architecture; from the agora of optical knowing to the common worlds of auditory resistance and haunting reverberation. Communities whose resonant invisibility inhabits the left-behind and unwanted move us from productivity and efficiency to festivities and gifts. Such shifts view community less through sightlines and public engagement, with spheres of musicality and listening that allow a sensory-spatial politics to emerge; one that stays with the disenfranchized and the dispossessed.
From the sites and experiences of workers to the realities of eviction that can define neoliberal urban life, Wollny’s is as much a project of protest as of giving expression to poetic forms of self-determination. Singing Machine, from 2022, highlights these perspectives. Developed for the Malakoff-style tower at the Hannover Colliery in Germany, the sound installation is comprised of recorded the dialogues the artist made with residents of the Ruhr region. In a place defined by heavy industry and with a history of attracting migrant workers from Europe and the Mediterranean, Wollny is concerned with capturing the “collective fears and visions” related to “ecological and economic transformation processes.”3 Featuring tuba and guitar, and abstract vocalizations and electronics, the sound installation is diffused through 11 audio channels, creating an immersive experience in the reverberant halls of the tower. In a compositional gathering of voices and gestures, Singing Machine articulates a site-specificity that raises the volume on the meanings of place and the lives rooted therein.
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Music in Wollny’s work is not so much descriptive as it is transformative, seeking to enable the movement of sentiment and feelings of personal and collective desire. By employing music as a creative medium, the artist captures the ways in which sound, noise, voice and articulation are defining of acts in the pursuit of social equality. The capacity for marginalized voices and communities to participate in political life often relies on the meaningful reverberations that carry them into arenas of public discourse. There is an acoustic, sonic framework surrounding the work of justice; one that Wollny passionately activates through resonances and songs that grant an acoustic support for expressions of dissent.
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In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali insists that noise be understood as “the simulacrum of murder”.4 His assertion is founded on the notion that noise – as static; as that which interferes with meaning; as nonsense – wields force against the status quo. In other words, noise is defined as antithetical to established form; to society in general. It is by nature an interruptive other to the the order of things. Noise is therefore more than political in that it does not seek necessarily to enter into the arena of power; to participate or to be understood according to the terms of dominant discourse. Rather, as the simulacrum of murder, it seeks to end the lineage of a certain regime of intelligibility. It is pure violence, figuring an absolute break.
Noise, though, is never simply abstract. Because it is experienced in context, it derives its force in situ; as sound out of place. A trespasser, a migrant, a dissonance, which gains force by rubbing against conventions of meaning and behavior – grating across the categorical partitions that shape thought. To make noise clears the way for the emergence or propagation of the marginalized. It destabilizes orderly constructs, granting access to that which is outside. In this sense, and in the sense that Wollny works with noise, its dissonant and interruptive force invites us into a space of listening. Yet it is a listening that is itself dispossessed in that noise brutalizes, takes, assaults. Noise accentuates the vulnerability that is listening: I am undone by what I hear.
This may be appreciated as something more than a political when marginalized voices of protests, of anger, give way to an unexpected lyricism of community. Music in Wollny’s work is the sound of a collective body and the movement of a social composition that has at its noisy centre the power of renewal.
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Dynamic reverberation is present in Wollny’s site-specific works executed in factory spaces and abandoned architectures. In acoustic scenes realized through acts of vocalization, the percussing of objects, the reverberant qualities of a space come to the fore, bringing the environment to life. Reverberation emerges as an extra-dimension – expanding the sense of place by way of echoes,. As in her Singing Machine, or in 2011’s Song of Work, reverberation acts as a partner – an acoustic figure that contributes to the work’s energetic evocations.
While reverberation is an embedded, acoustical feature present in most architecture, it emerges in Wollny’s work as a counter-acoustic. Sounding out given architectures brings about a transformation that aims for an affective-political poetics. It can be heard as interventions in dominant tonalities that reconfigure time and space; giving way to other resonances, other reverberant possibilities. If acoustics lends support to the propagation of particular sounds and voices, it further participates in the movements of personal and collective meanings and desires. As such, acoustics is a question of power. Wollny’s resonant and reverberant musicalities push a given acoustics in new directions, allowing for new movements of social composition; a sounding and hearing that do not rest. By questioning in reverberant tonalities the heirarchical structures that define Capitlaist workplaces, Song of Work calls for an acoustic commons.
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Lingis gives a compelling account of the ethical encounter in his book, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common; one that moves him to sympathy. He writes: “What recognizes the suffering of the other is a sensitivity in my hands, in my voice, and in my eyes … moved by the movements of abandon and vulnerability of the other … and which turns one’s hands, one’s dexterity into tact and tenderness.”5
Lingis views the other from his fieldwork across Southeast Asia. Standing before those who live outside his Western position, he is moved beyond the strictly face-to-face confrontation and toward a fuller, embodied, affective relation – toward “the humming, buzzing, murmuring, crackling, and roaring of the world” and the “stammerings, quaverings, and dronings of another’s voice.”6 Immersed in this encounter, Lingis comes to recognize the ways in which others dispossess him. “To enter into conversation with another is to lay down one’s arms and one’s defenses.”7
Lingis embraces this state of dispossession as one that deepens recognition, giving way not so much to a representation for the unrepresented. But to a narrative of encounter, of being overcome; to give narrative precisely when language falters, overcome with noise – with what he calls the empirical. “The noise of our throats that fills the time it takes to convey the message communicates the noise of the things or makes the things discernible in their empirical plurality.”8
In this scene of empirical encounter and dispossession, language is subsumed in the murmur of the world, musics and sonorities echo and resonate with the deeper tonality of place, and the flood of noises surrounding is but an instance of surprising communion. As Lingis suggests, not the ideal transparent reasonableness of modern individuality. Rather, the translations and trespasses, even the mishearings, by which relationality expands, bringing one close to the trembling of the world and each other.
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What is this community of those who have nothing in common? What is its significance? And in what ways does being dispossessed figure? To be overcome with the noise of others, to encounter instances of foreignness where language falters, requires another form of navigation. It takes a willingness to be vulnerable; to be dependent on others. Such are the terms and experiences by which community, as being-in-common, find traction; where what counts as identity and the borders of places tremble.
Trembling; shivering with hesitation excitement, and listening for new routes and associations, for guidance, as well as for new states of solidarity. Such dynamics run like a current across Wollny’s works. From Resonance Assembly to Singing Machine and from Eviction Songs to Song of Work, the reality of dispossession is brought forward and made audible and active. Whether in states of vulnerability, precarity or abandonment. Or in acts that seek to break down singularity in the making of a greater social movement. Or in the ghostly movements of a reverberant sound. Her works constitute lyrical statements made by bringing together so many individual gestures, voices, memories, and hopes. As with the Polyphonic Manifiesto made in 2019 in response to the proliferation of illiberal political agendas in Poland and across Europe, her works express a belief in the power found in collective sound. Bringing together a multiplicity of voices and communities around charged issues and utopian visions, Polyphonic Manifesto is a music for now in the form of a sustained act of protest that prefigures a society to come. It is a collective sound grounded in an agonistic coming together that does not “search for harmony” as it trembles with a vibrational emergent potentiality. Wollny’s are fighting works, moving and sensual; music we may sing along with as part of our right to dignified lives.
Brandon LaBelle, January 2023
Bibliography
Giorgio Agamben, Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).