Jena Walk (Memory Field)

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Jena Walk (Memory Field)

2006

Medium:
Audio walk

Commissioner:
Commissioned by the Culture Department of the City of Jena, Germany.

Cardiff & Miller

A walk is an act of contemplation. For this walk the visitors were taken on a journey over a pastoral landscape where the battle between the Prussians and Napolean took place 200years ago. This is also a landscape where Russian tanks did military exercises and where Louise Seidler (the painter of Goethe from Jena) may have walked. Through excerpts from Seidler’s diary entries we unfold a layered narrative that deals with the physicality of memory. There are also sound effects from battle scenes: cannons, muskets and horses galloping by. Time slips from one century to another as the listener walks, aware of their feet on the earth and the wind on their face. They will be aware that they are walking on the site just as others have walked over the same earth the last two hundred years, their stories mixing with those in the past.