A K Dolven

40 voices rankweil

2017
St. Michaelskirche, Rankweil, Austria
soundpiece
cry baby pedal, engraved stone with list of women´s birthdates

Initiator Msgr. Dr. Walter Juen
Curator                 Gaby Hartel
Sound technician         Martin Beck
Photographer      Thierry Bal

Mainly the girls and women of the parish used the church of St. Michael in Rankweil (8thcentury), before its closure in 1956. It was a place of quiet concentration and a social meetingpoint. A K Dolven interprets the church’s history as sealed time, while using the geological, cultural, social, spiritual and emotional traces that surfaced during the six-year long phase of development and restoration in this project: previous buildings, signs of labour in the rock, the bones laid to rest here. Add to that the immaterial memories of past activities that still determine Rankweil’s social fabric today.

 On the 20th of May 2017, forty girls and women from the area surrounding Liebfrauenberg on which St. Michael is situated, came together for a brunch and a subsequent collective recording session, invited by the artist. Each of the participants carries biographic information in her voice; age, life experience, life story – that here becomes the auratic and polyphonic expression of a single word. All forty voices were recorded saying collectively the word “JA” (or yes in English). One of the oldest participants fled her home after the Second World War, two of the youngest girls are refugees from the recent conflict zones in the Middle East.

 40 voices rankweil permeates the church like a breath of air, triggered by the physical step on a „cry-baby“ steel pedal: a contemporary readymade and also an icon of rock music history. Names and birth years of the protagonists are engraved in the tactile surface of a 500 000 year old sandstone, in the handwriting of the artist. Thus A K Dolven connects the durable material of stone with the human voice, an epitome of fleeting time. The sound work becomes an acoustic palimpsest, condensing layers of historical and contemporary experiences whilst pointing to the future.