Yvonne Buchheim
Song Archive Project
I can’t sing. I never had a voice. Still songs have become my passion. If somebody would have said to me that one day, I will perform songs in front of an audience, I would have laughed at the thought. When I was growing up in East Germany we learned songs that praised our socialist future, the army or our Russian brother nation. Years later, one night at a session in local pub in Cushendall, Co. Antrim, I was asked to sing a German song. All I could remember were those socialist marching tunes and in the end I performed a Russian song called Katjuscha. That night I decided that I would learn other German songs. Around this time I started to develop a project on the lost past of the GDR and began to perform East German songs in public in different European cities. The project titled ‘Lob des Liedes’ (Praise the song) (2001) documents the performance of these socialist anthems that have become obsolete, and in some cases taboo, re-contextualised in a different time and location.
In 2003 I was invited on a three-month residency from the ACC Gallery in Weimar, Germany and my interest in songs and identity lead me to Romantic German philosopher J. G. Herder. In the late 18th century he collected songs throughout Europe and developed a theory that the cultural identity of a people was reflected through their songs. At this time Germans were portrayed in satirical drawings as chaotic, indolent and melancholic individuals. This clichÈ was about to be radically altered when 160 years later the Nazi ideology tried to raise the German race and culture above all other nations. German Volkslieder were part of this propaganda and the resulting post-war division led to equally troubled relationships with German folksongs. I began to see reasons for the lack of my German folksong repertoire. I wondered if Herder’s theory could be applied in 2005 and what a contemporary German song archive would unearth. Herder’s theory was founded in a pre-industrial Revolution society long before modern communication technology. The question arose of what kind of songs and languages would people choose to perform? How could the results from different countries be compared?
After my initial song collection in Germany three years ago, I have further developed the Song Archive project in England, Ireland and recently the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the Song Archive I have approached people from different ages and backgrounds and simply asked them to perform a song of their choice in front of a video camera. This spontaneous interaction is both surprising in the variety and the similarity of the singers’ choices.
Within the German archive I noticed a high percentage of songs in English (a mix of heavy German accents and some fake English and American accents). The Song Archive was exhibited as a series of video installation in the ACC Gallery in 2004 and combined German and English performers. The installation provided a cultural framework and playfully suggests many complex identities through songs and challenges stereotypical reading. Memories are evoked of forgotten songs and we are introduced to a remarkable variety of performances.
In 2005 I was awarded two residencies in Ireland that enabled me to create an Irish Song Archive. In June I participated in the Soundworks exhibition organised by Art Trail in Cork and collected over 120 songs. To ensure a diversity of social backgrounds I organised a variety of public spaces. I approached people on the street in Cork and convinced them to sing. With the assistance of the central library and a cinema on Grand Parade I was able to use a quiet room. Also other recordings were made in a school, a pensioner’s home, a restaurant, several cafes, parks and the residency’s studio space at the Backwater Studios. These venues allowed me to create a broad range of song recording in an impromptu manner. After my experiences in Germany and England, I couldn’t believe how easily I could record songs in Ireland. Not everybody I approached did agree to sing but with approximately 1 in 4 people participating, Cork is placed well above the other cities I worked in before.
The Folkatronika residency at the SSI in August this year allowed me an intensive editing period of the accumulated Cork recordings. The residency programme facilitated the processing of the huge amount of collected work, not only by providing the technology but also giving technical support. The project unfolded in an empirical manner through experimenting in the editing. It brought about a variety of approaches using elements of the recordings that I had previously overlooked such as the moments before and after the actual performance and the breath that is needed to sing the song. I also introduced alternative narratives by juxtaposing individual singers on multiple screens. Importantly, Folkatronika also allowed me to evolve the project for the forthcoming trip to Iran in September this year.
Iran was a truly incredible experience. I spent quite some time in Tehran, a loud, chaotic metropolis of 14 million people. To escape the city I took up an offer to do a residency in the Paradise Arts Centre in the Alborz mountains. The arts centre is located in the Poloor region, north of the Damaravan, a 5000 meter snow-capped mountain.
I recorded local people singing in both Tehran and Poloor with quite different outcomes in both places. I also started to film the singers within their environment and not in front of a white screen so you really get a sense of the place. Even though I had read quite a lot, nothing can prepare you for the culture shock and the different way of life, morals and understanding. As a female foreigner I had to wear a hejab and a coat on top of my long clothes in the boiling heat, which was very uncomfortable. Although I found so many attitudes that I don't agree with in the male/female relationships, it is not actually as black and white as I had imagined before. Certainly as a female artist I was very accepted and people were extremely open and curious.
The experience has been brilliant in terms of recording non-professional singers and as so many times before, it reflected a national culture. The gender roles are very separate and men live their life within the public arena. Often they sang spontaneously endlessly long songs with beautiful voices and incredible charm.
The women on the other hand are very much hidden away and in the daily life you hardly see them on the streets. Women’s daily tasks like shopping rarely allow them to socialize in cafes like men do. Most women are shy to outsiders and it doesn't help that by law it is forbidden for women to perform in public (female singers can only perform in front of female audiences). I found very few women who would perform a song in front of a camera so these recordings are especially pertinent.
One brave woman not only performed without a hejab but she also sang songs by the Iranian female singer Googoosh who has emigrated to Los Angeles. She sang so passionately, it was truly moving. She knew every single song of this singer and didn't want to stop singing for me so I kept recording her for nearly an hour. Her emotional performance was full of passion, fear and anger. I am now working on combining her performance with the footage of men singing.
I came across another woman singer in the mountain village one evening when her family invited us to join their party. Family gatherings are a fundamental structure to the social relations in Iran and family bonds are very close. The young woman was a music student and performed a beautiful song in the garden as her family looked on. As the evening progressed everybody started dancing (officially men and women should be dancing in separate rooms) and even some alcohol appeared (strictly forbidden). The woman grew more and more quiet and finally asked me to erase her singing. I was shocked at the self-censorship but I followed her request to black out her singing. However I kept all the video footage before and after the song recording, the chatter and applause, and on reflection I realized that the absence commented far more deeply on the social dynamic of this culture.
In another video piece I documented my own performance of a German song titled Die Gedanken sind frei (The thoughts are free). This song references the restrictions on female singers in Iran but resonates with many other places and situations where people are restricted by their circumstances and conditions.
When watching the video you can clearly see my anxiety, I am nervous, not knowing the consequences of singing in public in Iran. You can also hear that I can’t sing.
I am carrying the weight of my own personal history. In regards to this particular song, German history can be traced back to the 13th century when Walther von der Vogelweide wrote parts of the lyrics. The song has been banned twice - during the German Revolution in 1848/49 and during the Third Reich.
(2006)
Song Archive Project
I can’t sing. I never had a voice. Still songs have become my passion. If somebody would have said to me that one day, I will perform songs in front of an audience, I would have laughed at the thought. When I was growing up in East Germany we learned songs that praised our socialist future, the army or our Russian brother nation. Years later, one night at a session in local pub in Cushendall, Co. Antrim, I was asked to sing a German song. All I could remember were those socialist marching tunes and in the end I performed a Russian song called Katjuscha. That night I decided that I would learn other German songs. Around this time I started to develop a project on the lost past of the GDR and began to perform East German songs in public in different European cities. The project titled ‘Lob des Liedes’ (Praise the song) (2001) documents the performance of these socialist anthems that have become obsolete, and in some cases taboo, re-contextualised in a different time and location.
In 2003 I was invited on a three-month residency from the ACC Gallery in Weimar, Germany and my interest in songs and identity lead me to Romantic German philosopher J. G. Herder. In the late 18th century he collected songs throughout Europe and developed a theory that the cultural identity of a people was reflected through their songs. At this time Germans were portrayed in satirical drawings as chaotic, indolent and melancholic individuals. This clichÈ was about to be radically altered when 160 years later the Nazi ideology tried to raise the German race and culture above all other nations. German Volkslieder were part of this propaganda and the resulting post-war division led to equally troubled relationships with German folksongs. I began to see reasons for the lack of my German folksong repertoire. I wondered if Herder’s theory could be applied in 2005 and what a contemporary German song archive would unearth. Herder’s theory was founded in a pre-industrial Revolution society long before modern communication technology. The question arose of what kind of songs and languages would people choose to perform? How could the results from different countries be compared?
After my initial song collection in Germany three years ago, I have further developed the Song Archive project in England, Ireland and recently the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the Song Archive I have approached people from different ages and backgrounds and simply asked them to perform a song of their choice in front of a video camera. This spontaneous interaction is both surprising in the variety and the similarity of the singers’ choices.
Within the German archive I noticed a high percentage of songs in English (a mix of heavy German accents and some fake English and American accents). The Song Archive was exhibited as a series of video installation in the ACC Gallery in 2004 and combined German and English performers. The installation provided a cultural framework and playfully suggests many complex identities through songs and challenges stereotypical reading. Memories are evoked of forgotten songs and we are introduced to a remarkable variety of performances.
In 2005 I was awarded two residencies in Ireland that enabled me to create an Irish Song Archive. In June I participated in the Soundworks exhibition organised by Art Trail in Cork and collected over 120 songs. To ensure a diversity of social backgrounds I organised a variety of public spaces. I approached people on the street in Cork and convinced them to sing. With the assistance of the central library and a cinema on Grand Parade I was able to use a quiet room. Also other recordings were made in a school, a pensioner’s home, a restaurant, several cafes, parks and the residency’s studio space at the Backwater Studios. These venues allowed me to create a broad range of song recording in an impromptu manner. After my experiences in Germany and England, I couldn’t believe how easily I could record songs in Ireland. Not everybody I approached did agree to sing but with approximately 1 in 4 people participating, Cork is placed well above the other cities I worked in before.
The Folkatronika residency at the SSI in August this year allowed me an intensive editing period of the accumulated Cork recordings. The residency programme facilitated the processing of the huge amount of collected work, not only by providing the technology but also giving technical support. The project unfolded in an empirical manner through experimenting in the editing. It brought about a variety of approaches using elements of the recordings that I had previously overlooked such as the moments before and after the actual performance and the breath that is needed to sing the song. I also introduced alternative narratives by juxtaposing individual singers on multiple screens. Importantly, Folkatronika also allowed me to evolve the project for the forthcoming trip to Iran in September this year.
Iran was a truly incredible experience. I spent quite some time in Tehran, a loud, chaotic metropolis of 14 million people. To escape the city I took up an offer to do a residency in the Paradise Arts Centre in the Alborz mountains. The arts centre is located in the Poloor region, north of the Damaravan, a 5000 meter snow-capped mountain.
I recorded local people singing in both Tehran and Poloor with quite different outcomes in both places. I also started to film the singers within their environment and not in front of a white screen so you really get a sense of the place. Even though I had read quite a lot, nothing can prepare you for the culture shock and the different way of life, morals and understanding. As a female foreigner I had to wear a hejab and a coat on top of my long clothes in the boiling heat, which was very uncomfortable. Although I found so many attitudes that I don't agree with in the male/female relationships, it is not actually as black and white as I had imagined before. Certainly as a female artist I was very accepted and people were extremely open and curious.
The experience has been brilliant in terms of recording non-professional singers and as so many times before, it reflected a national culture. The gender roles are very separate and men live their life within the public arena. Often they sang spontaneously endlessly long songs with beautiful voices and incredible charm.
The women on the other hand are very much hidden away and in the daily life you hardly see them on the streets. Women’s daily tasks like shopping rarely allow them to socialize in cafes like men do. Most women are shy to outsiders and it doesn't help that by law it is forbidden for women to perform in public (female singers can only perform in front of female audiences). I found very few women who would perform a song in front of a camera so these recordings are especially pertinent.
One brave woman not only performed without a hejab but she also sang songs by the Iranian female singer Googoosh who has emigrated to Los Angeles. She sang so passionately, it was truly moving. She knew every single song of this singer and didn't want to stop singing for me so I kept recording her for nearly an hour. Her emotional performance was full of passion, fear and anger. I am now working on combining her performance with the footage of men singing.
I came across another woman singer in the mountain village one evening when her family invited us to join their party. Family gatherings are a fundamental structure to the social relations in Iran and family bonds are very close. The young woman was a music student and performed a beautiful song in the garden as her family looked on. As the evening progressed everybody started dancing (officially men and women should be dancing in separate rooms) and even some alcohol appeared (strictly forbidden). The woman grew more and more quiet and finally asked me to erase her singing. I was shocked at the self-censorship but I followed her request to black out her singing. However I kept all the video footage before and after the song recording, the chatter and applause, and on reflection I realized that the absence commented far more deeply on the social dynamic of this culture.
In another video piece I documented my own performance of a German song titled Die Gedanken sind frei (The thoughts are free). This song references the restrictions on female singers in Iran but resonates with many other places and situations where people are restricted by their circumstances and conditions.
When watching the video you can clearly see my anxiety, I am nervous, not knowing the consequences of singing in public in Iran. You can also hear that I can’t sing.
I am carrying the weight of my own personal history. In regards to this particular song, German history can be traced back to the 13th century when Walther von der Vogelweide wrote parts of the lyrics. The song has been banned twice - during the German Revolution in 1848/49 and during the Third Reich.
(2006)
