International Print Triennial, Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków, Poland - Hamelin Polska Award for Krakow to Venice in 12 hours

Abstract

International Print Triennial in Kraków, awarded Hamelin Polska Prize for “Kraków to Venice in 12 Hours.”
The international Jury of the Print Triennial Kraków 2015 (Stephen Hoskins,Uk; Alicia Candiani, Argentina; Vladimiro Elvieri, Italy; Krystyna Piotrowska, Poland and Lars Yeudakimchikov-Malmquist, Sweden) selected 105 finalists from 1105 submission from all over the world. From the UK only two artists were selected: our colleague from UCLAn Peter Clarke and myself.

“Kraków to Venice in 12 hours” maps a journey across Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Slovenia to Italy, visiting Krakow, Katowice, Bielsko-Biala, Ostrava, Brno, Bratislava, Vienna, Graz, Maribor, Ljubljana, Trieste and Venice. The journey was undertaken on a railway connecting Eastern and Western Europe that was built during the reign of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The project attempts to captures the unique sonic identities of the 12 cities travelled through, searching for similarities and differences. It acts as a personal and subjective audio travel guide and a clock for the journey, mapping the movement through geographical locations over the passage of time. The artist captures the city with binaural microphones; two microphones are worn in her ears as she moves through the city giving a personal time space perspective of the city soundscape. The unobtrusive microphones also bring the artist passing snippets of unguarded conversations interwoven with the unique sonic footprint of the city. The language recorded on the streets, stations, town squares and cafes is an important element of the piece; marking the transition from one country to another, it serves as a spatial and temporal reference for the traveler in a borderless Schengen Europe. The structure of a 12-hour clock forms the basis of the immersive multichannel sound installation. In this 12 hour-long composition, the times of the recordings are synchronous with the real time of the installation’s location.

“50.06465,19.94498 to 45.441058,12.320845” (set of 6 prints) is a visual record of the artist’s movement through 12 urban locations where the field recordings took place for the “Kraków to Venice in 12 hours” project. The artist as an outsider is looking for key points within the urban space, but the city imposes its structure and creates a unique pattern for each of the drawings denoting the walks. The coloured dots on the map point to locations where the recordings took place on the hour. The printed record of latitude and longitude allows the viewer to discover exact locations where audio material was recorded.

The project exists on line as an interactive platform, where the listener can move through geographical locations and time listening to the field recordings and compositions on chosen parts of the journey. www.krakowtovenicein12h.com