Susan Philipsz in "Berlin" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Susan Philipsz: Living in Berlin, the history 
is so raw and you still feel it.

I think it's that it doesn't 
want to hide its past.

When I first came to Berlin,

this was one of the first 
places I came to actually.

Train stations, they're very evocative 
places, places of departure and separation.

That has a melancholy feel 
about it, I think, the station.

I love that sound.

I'm interested in the emotive and 
psychological effects of sound.

Often I'm just looking for a place that has an 
interesting acoustic or architecture history.

Like in Kassel, for instance, it was the 
atmosphere of the train station that drew me.

“Study for Strings” started from 
standing at the platform's end

and thinking about sound coming from a distance.

I discovered that Kassel is where they made 
major deportations of the Jews to Theresienstadt,

which was a concentration camp where 
they sent all the creative people.

I started thinking about Pavel Haas 
who'd composed this composition,

“Study for Strings,” while 
he was interned in the camp.

It was to feature in this 
propaganda movie for the Red Cross.

They wanted to pretend that 
everything was great in the camp.

It was really tragic because it was straight after 
it was shot, they were all sent to Auschwitz.

In the original composition, 
it was a 24-piece orchestra.

What I decided to do was to 
record just two of the parts.

Silence really makes you think about the absence 
of the other performers who would've been killed.

Eoghan McTigue: There was never a point where we were 
working together as a collective.

It just seemed to develop out 
of our shared life together.

After we moved to Berlin, it became 
clear that Susan was getting very busy.

I started to manage some of Susan's productions.

Susan is much more intuitive and can determine 
the tone or the atmosphere of a space.

Susan has a very good understanding of space,

when a space is layered and 
when the meaning is just there,

just below the surface,

and then just doing something very 
minimal to let it reveal itself.

Susan Philipsz: I was invited to make a work that 
marks the 80th anniversary of the

annexation of Austria to Germany as 
that happened after Hitler's speech.

It's not something that they're proud of, 
but they want to acknowledge their part in it.

With each new project in public 
space, I make a sound test just

to get an idea of how the sound 
would be in this particular space

because sometimes it can do 
really unpredictable things.

You can place anything in the Heldenplatz, I mean and it will take on a political connotation because of the context.

At the beginning, I tested a work which used the sound of a viola.

And another work where I actually used my voice.

Singing has always been

part of my life, singing with my sisters.

Then I was in a band for a little while.

Then I became aware of what happens when you

project your voice into a room 
and how it can define space.

I think it's clear that I don't have a trained voice.

I'm singing in a way that you 
might sing if you were on your own.

The songs I've sung in the supermarket 
I originally

performed live where I sang over 
the PA system at hourly intervals.

It has quite a disarming effect because you feel 
like you're listening to something quite private.

I'm trying to create this sense of 
solitude in this very public place.

I thought of songs as found objects.

Singing them unaccompanied and 
then placing them in a particular

context could make you see the place in a new way,

or the words might take on a new meaning.

The song “Lowlands,” which was 
this old 16th century Scottish

ballad about a sailor who comes back to 
say a final farewell to his loved one,

it's a very sad lament, but the context 
prevents you from really being moved.

Recording for my voice, or battling with 
the sounds of the trains and the traffic,

you're all of a sudden aware 
of where you are because the

ambient sound is really loud and hostile.

When I was really young, I was more interested in

the historical part of the museum 
rather than the painting galleries

because I found that really boring.

“War Damaged Musical Instruments” is a work that 
has been going for a few years now.

I've been recording these musical 
instruments that have been damaged in war.

The first ones I came across 
were the ones here in Berlin.

That led me to different musical 
instrument museums here in Germany.

It was clear to see that these instruments 
could never play music anymore.

They were so badly damaged. But 
they still could produce sound.

Sometimes it would be a very fragile, delicate 
sound, and it was really more about the breath.

I became interested in breath 
being a metaphor for life.

Each of the speakers plays a tone from the 
“Taps” and represents a different instrument.

Originally it was used on the battlefield.

It was one of the signals that 
meant it was safe to come back.

It makes you wonder who was the last person 
to have played it and what happened to them.

As a student I wanted to make political art with a 
capital P, but I was never happy with the results.

Those political themes come through 
the work in a more subtle way.

In Vienna, the work that was the 
most successful was the sound of

me rubbing the rim of four crystal wine glasses.

It does have this kind of feeling of a voice.

I wanted to give voice to those forgotten 
voices who were persecuted during the Holocaust.

By defining the space with sound, you draw 
attention to and remind people what happened here.

Sound can really act as a trigger for memory, then 
can bring you back to a particular place and time.

I wanted to bring those voices 
from the past into the present.