Sounds after Caspar David Friedrich
2015–ongoing
This ongoing project revisits the iconic paintings of the Romantic German artist Caspar David Friedrich in situ, capturing them anew through professional sound recordings.
Through rigorous research, the specific sites and landscapes depicted by Friedrich in the 19th century were mapped, located, and visited. Their present-day acoustic environments were recorded using professional equipment, creating an immersive auditory experience. The project invites a contemplative reflection on nature through sound and presence, offering an alternative to today’s image-saturated engagement with the natural world.
The work functions both as a celebration of Friedrich’s artistic legacy and as a critique of contemporary life—highlighting our image-mediated, often superficial relationship with nature. It extends Friedrich’s own critique of modernity, evoking the tension between humanity and the natural world in his time, and reframing it for our era, where the unity between people and environment is increasingly fragmented. In this sense, the project also comments on the commodification of modernity, where experiences and landscapes are often reduced to consumable images and social media content.
Photographs of the artist capturing the sounds of these landscapes are included solely for illustrative purposes. In exhibitions, no contemporary images of the famous sites are displayed. Instead, the work is presented through professional sound systems, sometimes accompanied by carefully collected physical fragments from the landscapes themselves.
Among the landscapes explored, two of the most emblematic are the sites of Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809) and Chalk Cliffs in Rügen, both painted on Rügen Island. To date, eight landscapes have been visited and recorded.
Fragments of Sounds after Caspar David Friedrich have been included in major institutional group exhibitions. Notably, the project featured in FUTURUINS (2018) at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy, alongside Friedrich’s The Dreamer on loan from the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
It was shown at the Festival Arte Atual (2016) at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Brazil
This project was made possible by the Exchange residency grant of NES/ Kunstlerhaus Lukas, in Ahrenshoop, Germany, received in 2015.
Arte Atual Festival
Instituto Tomie Ohtake
São Paulo - BR
2016
Light camera action?
Reflections on the Arte Atual Festival
Olivia Ardui
The second edition of the Arte Atual Festival, entitled Quadro, Desquadro, Requadro, had as its starting point a reflection on the ways of constructing space and the limits of representation. A bold and ambitious proposition for a cycle of exhibitions that is defined as a more experimental proposal and with a less rigid commitment to theoretical assumptions, given the ambiguity and complexity of the term widely used in the discourse and theory of the arts.
To cite one eminent example among many, Ernst Gombrich starts from the definition of representation understood as a way of "invoking through description or portrait or imagination, figuring, simulating in the mind or through the senses, serving as or being had by the appearance of, being for, be a specimen of, take the place of, be a substitute for"[1]. This image or scenic presentation makes visible and, therefore, present, a reality, a person or even an idea, which would not actually be before our eyes. But this presentification does not replicate the thing represented in the manner of a mirror, it implies a process of abstraction, attribution of meanings to recognizable symbols, socially and historically constructed with the aim of being read and apprehended by spectators.
If we consider this definition literally, namely, in its sense of making an absence present, of revealing something that would not normally be seen, on the one hand, but also the constructed and conventional character of that appearance, the idea of representation strongly resonates with the works present in the exhibition. In fact, the works presented seem to share a desire to highlight or make more palpable structures and devices for the constitution of characters and fictions, for the elaboration of a setting or the composition of the image or, in a more indirect way, to uncover veiled memories and stories about a person or place.
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In Sounds after Caspar David Friedrich, Renata De Bonis also deals with the aestheticization of an experience in the context of painting as opposed to concrete reality. The artist researches the sublime landscapes consecrated by this German romantic painter from the first half of the 19th century. Known for his paintings in which figures are lost amidst grandiose horizons and monumental medieval ruins, Friedrich's work is representative of the evil of the century, a feeling of melancholy in the face of the futility of existence, the greatness of nature and the past. During a residency she carried out in Germany, the artist mapped, located and visited several of the settings in which he had created his paintings in order to come across these landscapes and all the imagery that was built around them.
Renata De Bonis then captured the sound of these environments, precisely their most impalpable and evanescent dimension. The recorded sound was edited into tracks that correspond to specific locations in Friedrich's works. Speakers spread throughout the space played one track at a time, updating, about a century and a half away, the acoustic ambience of that place. The view of an apparently calm and serene sea, as well as the sober composition of Der Mönch am Meer [Monk Before the Sea], for example, contrast with the vehemence and violence of the sound of breaking waves. These contrasts point once again to the conventional character of representation, which implies the composition and reorganization of elements in an image or scenic field.
Futuruins
Palazzo Fortuny
Veneza, IT
2018
Futuruins
Palazzo Fortuny
Veneza, IT
2018
The exhibition reflects on the theme of ruins: an allegory for the inexorable passage of time, always uncertain and changeable, disputed between past and future, life and death, destruction and creation, Nature and Culture. The aesthetics of ruins is a crucial element in the history of Western civilization. The ruin as a concept symbolizes the presence of the past but at the same time contains within itself the potential of the fragment: a fragment that comes from antiquity, covered by the patina of time, which with its cultural and symbolic implications also becomes a valid “foundation stone” for building the future. It comes from the past, confers a wealth of meaning on the present, and offers awareness to future projects. The contemporary itinerary opens with the extraordinary environmental installation by Anne and Patrick Poirier, and is followed by other works by Acconci Studio, Olivio Barbieri, Botto & Bruno, Alberto Burri, Sara Campesan, Ludovica Carbotta, Ugo Carmeni, Lawrence Carroll, Giulia Cenci, Giacomo Costa, Roberto Crippa, Lynn Davis, Giorgio de Chirico, Federico de Leonardis, Marco Del Re, Paola De Pietri, Jean Dubuffet, Tomas Ewald, Cleo Fariselli, Kay Fingerle, Maria Friberg, Luigi Ghirri, Gioberto Noro, John Gossage, Thomas Hirschhorn, Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Jodice, Wolfgang Laib, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Jonatah Manno, Mirco Marchelli, Steve McCurry, Ennio Morlotti, Sarah Moon, Margherita Muriti, Claudio Parmiggiani, Lorenzo Passi, Fabrizio Prevedello, Dmitri Prigov, Judit Reigl, Christian Retschlag, David Rickard, Mimmo Rotella, Anri Sala, Alberto Savinio and Elisa Sighicelli. In line with the tradition of exhibitions at the Fortuny, there are also a series of works specifically made for “Futuruins” that offer new stimuli for reflection on the present: in this case, these works are by Franco Guerzoni, Christian Fogarolli, Giuseppe Amato, Renato Leotta and Renata De Bonis.
The latter, with Sounds after Caspar David Friedrich: The Dreamer wanted to capture today's sounds of the place immortalized by the great German artist in the famous painting of The Dreamer, one of the masterpieces that came from Ermitage for this exhibition and a true icon of the nineteenth-century taste for ruins.
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