Living Nature

Artwork

The installation will be active each day from 10am to 7pm.

The installation Living Nature creates an artificial nature within the remains of the existing one. It consists of 24 loudspeakers buried along a walking path: invisible to the eye, unmistakable to the ear. The installation is based on the opposition of Naturkunst versus Kunstnatur, taking up this contradiction to demystify the human perception of nature in a playful way, without a didactic ulterior motive, but rather with a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach. Visitors will be met with an auditory trompe l’oeil of natural sound recordings of animals, wind, water, etc, but also with sounds that do not seem to belong in the natural habitat, leading the listener to confusion and doubt, emphasising the visual improbability of the created landscape.

Location

GPS coordinates artwork: 50°46'24.8"N 3°26'56.7"E

When the river Scheldt was last straightened in the previous century, a number of cut-offs were created with still or slow water. In the still meander water, fish, plants and other organisms keep up a delicate balance. The main natural attraction of the Scheldemeersen (‘Scheldt marshes’) lies in the watery meadows in the backlands and cut-off river bends. The marshes consist of extensive grasslands marked with a dense pattern of drainage canals. The marshes boast many waterloving plants, making them the ideal habitat for amphibians, dragonflies, butterflies and water birds. The river cut-offs are islands of tranquility, teeming with widely diverse still-water life. 

Artist

Internationally acclaimed composer and artist Hans Peter Kuhn lives and works in Berlin and Japan. His light and sound installations are exhibited in many museums and galleries or on public sites worldwide, among others at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1993, the installation Memory Loss by Robert Wilson and Hans Peter Kuhn was awarded with the Golden Lion in Venice. Kuhn worked for theatre, composed music for dances and is perhaps best known for the music and sound environments he created in his long-term collaboration with the same Robert Wilson. Hearing and listening are the themes of his performances. Since 2012 he is a guest professor for Sound Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin.