An oral history based art-project created in cooperation of four European new music organizations in four countries: Hungary, Austria, Serbia and Spain. Our project combines music and other art forms as well as a social and technical research. It involves 12 young artists of different genres selected through an international call in order to create sonification algorhythms and further collective works based on the collected materials.

The HoME installation is the most essential part of the whole project. It is a mobile studio, that can record and sonify the stories and opinions we collect. Once it was a horse–transporter vehicle, but our creative team rebuilt it into a special space. The interior is devided into a comfortable space, open for the audience, and the technical room. The first one is equipped with a chair, microphone and an ipad, the second one has a connected computer with an audio interface.
Around the installation there are loudspeakers to make audible the sonifications created in real time from the story telling action inside the installation. Through this the installation provides an individual and a community experience for the participants in the same time.

The exhibition consists of four different installations developed collaboratively by the four teams of the HoME project during 2021-2022 (Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Spain). Each installation reflects on the first phase of the project in which the four teams traveled to rural and urban areas in their countries with the HoME-house: As a point of departure the artists engaged in a conversation with the local inhabitants, the people and their history and started a process of exchange on the topic of the meaning of the word home. The collected stories and narratives have been transposed and recomposed into electronic sounds that we now call sonifications. Sonifications capture the participants’ numerous stories and their interaction with the HoME-house itself – at times playful and at times very intimate.

In this exhibition the four teams explore and reflect on their experiences through different means, inviting the visitor into different approaches of storytelling: the meaning of oral history of the visited places and their people.

At the beginning of the project’s research phase, the artists Conny Zenk, Eva-Maria Schaller and Marco Döttlinger, developed questions connected to the region of Lake Neusiedl, in particular, Podersdorf am See, a rural area situated in Burgenland (Austria). Setting up a participatory sound installation that invited local residents to join in, they collected stories, sounds, impressions, and experiences that initiated a process of translating narratives into various forms of artistic processes. Focusing on the central topic of translation as a pivotal phenomenon for their own collaborative practice, the artists analyzed the sounds and synthesized fragments of rhythms as well as speech melodies of recorded voices in order to superimpose and elaborate on these sounds created in real time. Progressively shifting their focus of the work from the idea of interviewing people to interviewing the space and even the natural elements around them such as water or bodies, they designed this transdisciplinary art installation as an ever-changing conversation in the image of a transformative landscape made of sound, video, and choreography. The installation is devised as hybrid multimedia performative work.
What does the landscape around Lake Neusiedl sound like? What changes within the last years or decades can you remember? The acoustic feel, the soundscape that surrounds us, is also always an indicator of the state of a system.

“The corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly — immobility. It is the sure place, the place next to my immobility.”
Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space

A space reflecting on the idea of ‘home’ as well as ‘integration’ and ‘connectedness’ with several vaguely connected elements that can create a complex intellectual and sensory experience.
The space contains the following objects:
A, Closed glass-container of living and growing funghi and bacteria derived from the air of the exhibition space.
B, A microphone on a stand with short instruction on how to interact with it,
C, A stack of books with one on the top, that can be read out loud by the guests of the installation,
D, Colored lights controlled by the frequency information of the voice of the guests,
E, Loudspeakers connected to a real-time corpus-based concatenative synthesis, a compositional tool using several sound recordings by guests of the previous phase of the HoME project in the four countries and creating an echo of the spoken voice

HoME Audio installation is an acousmatic electronic non durational installation for headphone listening. You are invited to sit down and join at any time, put a black medical mask over your eyes (as a blindfold), then put the headphones on and immerse into purely audio world made of human testimonies and stories. What you will hear is made of real time electronic treatments of human speech made during 5-day HoME field trip in Serbia (April 2022). All the sounds were collected and created in three palces: Novi Bečej (25.04.2022) a small town in northern Serbia, Belanovica (27.04.2022) a village in central Serbia and city of Novi Sad (29.04.2022), second largest city in the country. Majority of creation of sounds you will hear was done live (with real time manipulation of electronic processing) and is a result of live interaction with the visitors and their spoken testimonies. The  “automation” of electronic processing was minimal and majority of the sonified results came from live interaction, live tweaking, real time playing and reacting to the speech of our numerous guests (several dozen people). The original files created during the tour in Serbia were not significantly treated nor changed in post production but only carefully selected and arranged in a meaningful timeline. With all their flaws and particularities, they are a testimony of a several days long recording/sonification filed trip and interaction with local population. This installation is a sort of an audio museum. It is supposed to show both the result of our work and to transpose the feeling of our very lively fieldwork process.

in 2023 the participating artists are creating a unique event, a musictheater performance with soloists and chamber-ensemble based on their experiences of the previous phases, The piece will have at least four performances in all participating countries. In Budapest, Barcelona, Novi Sad and in Vienna. The four soloists  are participating artists (Eva Maria Schaller dancer, Ricardo Castor actor, Conny Zenk electronic musician performer and Dunja Crjanski performer and pianist). At every location a local chamber ensemble (UMZE Chamber Ensemble, Mixtur Ensemble, Black Page Orchestra and 2K+ ENS) will play the music composed by the four participating composers: Marco Döttlinger, Jug Markovic, Bálint Bolcsó and Carlos Nunez. The director of the performance is the London based Hungarian opera-diretor Franciska Éry. The libretto of the piece is based on the collected stories of the previous phases of the project. In 2023 all participants will work together online and in Serbia for finalizing the piece. All four initial performances will take place between 3 Sept and 23 Oct 2023.