Mansfeldprojekte: SPUREN_ (1993) und TON-SPUREN_ (2023)

1993
SPUREN_ Mansfeld Project
From 1991 to 1993, I carried out an extensive photographic project in the Mansfeld landscape. It was a time of profound political and social upheaval in East Germany. The status quo at the time: blasting, demolition, job losses and the disastrous state of a landscape after 800 years of mining history. During this period, I took several hundred photographs using analogue medium and large-format cameras. All images were exposed on black-and-white negative film. I enlarged a selection of these images onto black-and-white photographic paper for exhibition purposes, and also produced a number of small, hand-bound photo booklets.
The work SPUREN_ Mansfeldprojekt has been shown in exhibitions both in Germany and abroad. A selection of these photographs is now held in several art collections across the country.

NEW
30 years later
The contemporary landscape here is characterised not only by the striking slag heap landscape
of the former copper mining industry, but also by large-scale agriculture, wind farms, solar power plants,
power lines, substations, biogas plants… This new landscape structure
and its scale can be clearly grasped by viewing current aerial photographs.

2023
SOUND TRACES_ Mansfeld Project
My idea of creating a long-term sound archive within a landscape is based on the question: What if electroacoustic recording methods had existed centuries ago? What did a landscape sound like 200 or 300 years ago? How do I perceive a landscape that I do not see but hear?
Industrialisation led to a growing complexity of novel sounds and, in urban conurbations, to extreme noise pollution. This ‘background noise’ has a significant impact on people and nature. In addition to acoustic events that we can hear and which can be recorded with microphones, there are electromagnetic emissions/vibrations (large-scale technical installations, radio communications, computers, displays, circuits) that exist simultaneously and can be made audible using special electronic devices (transducers).

I recorded the sounds for this work over the last nine months in the Mansfeld countryside and the surrounding villages. In the sound piece TON-SPUREN_ Mansfeldprojekt, I have collaged together this subjective perception of a contemporary soundscape from numerous sound clips.

Text: Wieland Krause, June 2023