What does migration sound like?
A seven-member jury has selected the work “Triad” by the two Berlin-based artists Cyrill Lachauer and Ari Benjamin Meyers as “Art in Construction” in front of the German Emigration Center Bremerhaven. The piece is expected to be installed by the end of the year.
With the expansion of the Migration Museum in 2021, the question arose for a suitable artistic commentary on the multi-part, now significantly larger building ensemble. The new building houses an exhibition on the history of immigration to Germany as well as the research and educational institution Academy of Comparative Migration Studies (ACOMIS). The original house showcases migration from Europe to overseas. The call invited selected artists with the question “What does migration sound like?” The work is to be implemented in the open space at the harbor promenade in front of the museum, making it visible to all. The sound is intended to touch upon another dimension of the migration theme that cannot be represented in the museum.
The jury chose the collaboration between Cyrill Lachauer, whose multimedia installations have been shown in Munich, Berlin, and Rome, and composer and artist Ari Benjamin Meyers, whose interdisciplinary, often performative works have been featured at Art Basel, the Festival d’Avignon, and Mudam Luxembourg. The concept of the two artists, which convinced the jury, exists between the concrete-local and the abstract-universal and global: It engages with migration as a timeless phenomenon as well as a historical norm and allows for a connection to the highly relevant topic of “Environmental Migration,” also in a historically far-reaching perspective.
Cyrill Lachauer is a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He holds degrees in art and ethnology from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, UdK Berlin, and LMU Munich.
The project refers in a multifaceted way to connections and interweavings – in small and large social networks, with the living and non-living environment, across space and time. The work is intended to receive a material expression in three special boulders, which are also reflected in the working title “Triad.” These are stones that were transported hundreds of kilometers by glaciers during the Ice Age and are now found far from their original location – despite their great weight and physical resistance. The constant processes of change and ultimately the often overpowering forces of the environment on the individual should become audible: The composition of field recordings, such as audio recordings from different glaciers, human voices, and the sound of the find locations, will be audible in Bremerhaven. The sound of melting glaciers not only references the past and present but also deliberately draws a line into the future.
Ari Benjamin Meyers is a composer, conductor, and visual artist. He was educated at the Juilliard School, Yale University, and the Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University, USA.
The jury emphasized “the special poetry of the work” as the successful interplay of two current themes, climate change and migration, and that the implementation shows a high sensitivity to the fates of migrants. “[D]being driven, having to migrate, being thrown into a new environment [are] feelings that many migrants also express repeatedly in oral history interviews with scholars from the museum. The term ‘Findling’ reflects certain feelings and thoughts: the sense of being lost, the reliance on receiving help and support in one’s vulnerability,” the jury’s justification states. The work is framed in its place directly at the New Harbor by the two sections of the German Emigration Center.
The jury consists of four art experts – Prof. Ingo Vetter (University of the Arts, Bremen) as chair, Teresa Casanueva (visual artist, Berlin), Dr. Ingmar Lähnemann (Director of the Bremen City Gallery at the Senator for Culture of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen) and Mirjam Verhey-Focke (Curator, Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen) – as well as other jury members including museum director Dr. Simone Blaschka (German Emigration Center), architect Andreas Heller (Andreas Heller Architects & Designers, Hamburg), and Bremerhaven’s mayor Melf Grantz as chairman of the supervisory board of BEAN Bremerhaven Development Company Alter/New Harbor mbH & Co. KG (represented in the vote by Heiner Behrens, Dipl.-Ing. architect and authorized signatory of BEAN).
The expansion of the museum was funded by the federal government, the state of Bremen, and the city of Bremerhaven.
The space towards the harbor is still empty, but soon the work of the two artists living in Berlin will be visible here.