Making nature
exploring our imaginations when we speak about NATURE.
October 2021-dec 2022: working on the doku-fiction radioplay “Second Future” — a Hauser-figure, which creates his own Nature. (supported by Akademie der Künste Berlin).
March — dec 2022: working on a audio-visuell Lab in a post-industrial landscape to create frayed edges of a culturally created area.
September 2022: Making nature — 8 audio-channel installation, objects and performances in Knack Garden Leipzig during the Seanaps-Festival
August 5th 2022: for Radio Art Zone in Esch Wendt walked 22 hours meeting people and ideas surrounding surprising ways to understand the term of nature.
Therefore he spoke with people he meets on his long walk through a day and a small country, he will speak and listen to animals and plants, extraordinary and invented beings and landscapes. And probably he will invite people from other places to imagine what’s there around Esch.
4 mics, a small mixer in his pockets, a player and a telephone — with this smallest radiostudio he digged in the dirt, rested in the dawn, climbed trees and ruins.
Wendt works for years on the friction between romantic approaches to nature and the deconstruction of our understanding of it.
He works with animal voices and animalic human voices as well as different bodysounds of living beings.
Topic-related selection of previous works
Birds — Ambrosius-church
Magdeburg 1999
In a Video-and Audioinstallation Wendt worked together with the Berlin based artist Burghard Vogel on an imaginary “second world” underground of the church in Magdeburg for the opening of the Grenzgänger-Festival 1999.
Video and Sound transmitted „live“ into the church.
Vogel der Woche — bird of the week
weekly Podcast since 2009, to introduce one species to an audience, which is normally not interested in birds in ca. 30 noncommercial radios in Germany, Austria and switzerland.
Buch der imaginären Wesen — book of imaginary beings
Radioart for Deutschlandradio 1997 with texts by Jorge Luis Borges
Underground — installation gallery Moritzburg Halle 1999
Water, Foel, wood, metal, measering instruments, Audioinstallation
In the Basement of Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg according to artprice Saxony-Anhalt 1999 für artcollective TATARIN
Visitors walked on wooden pathes through a swampy ground of the basement, in which Wendt installed fictional growing life; the development of this was measured and translated into sounds
In the Performance-Collektive „Thewolfinthewinter“ Wendt works since 2001 about the frictions of human acting as a social but also animal being
Migration Klaipeda — Audioinstallation Klaipeda 2002
In a supermarket Wendt installed an installation with birdsounds of lituanian migration events, combines with reflexions of local biologists about human-nature-relationships
Rezension Ausstellungen Vakary Express 31.05.2002
Rikki Tiki & Tavi — Rauminstallation, Fotos, Audioinstallation Halle 2003
In an empty downtown-shop Daniel Herrmann and Wendt offered an Installation, which questioned our relationship to animals around us.
Cnimki (2007) — Photo-Audioinstallation in Kasan (Rus, Wolga)
native tatarian animals in the citycentre of Kasan
Temporary Audiopostcards, which have a long tradition in Russia, offered in the city centre on frequently visited spaces (Busstops, Kreml, bars). The cards included descriptions and voice-collages of rare animals of the graslands.
Alluvial-enrichment — Audioinstallation & Performance Peißnitz Halle/S. 2010
Together with his artcollegue and friend Thies Streifinger Wendt woke up a nightly alluvial forest 2010 in a Performance with a hidden Audioinstallation in Halle to tropical life.
art for animals — Installations and Performances Zoopark Halle Oktober 2011
With Hagen Bäcker and Thomas Rabisch curated Wendt and worked himself in the Festival art for animals in the Zoo
Halle. The daily „feeding round“ was consisting of compositions for 20 different species, produced together with biologists.
music for northern bald ibis
music for patagonian degus
music for Keas
music for Indian elephants
music for Humboldt penguins
Potoo en la casa — Performance und Installation Choroni, Venezuela 2013
In Venezuela Wendt put 2013 an Audio-Installation and Performance for the inhabitants of Choroni at the rainforest border. The used and partly arranged sounds were transporting voices of animals of the upper rainforest in deforested parts around the village
The Conquest of Nature (2015–2017)
(Feature-Series after the Book by David Blackbourne)
history and critic of nature-regulations in Germany
Radio-Feature menimals — relations humans and animals
Corax Halle 2010, Swr 2018
Birds — 2016 ORF Kunstradio
For this radioart-performance Wendt composed live 2016 for art’s birthday in Vienna with field recordings as a reminiscence to dadaistic demands (Hans Arp) for compositions with nature sounds.
Collectors radio — Installation — old Zoological Institute Domplatz Halle 2016
In a 16-channel-microphone-mix was the inner life of the 300 years old building of nature science collections transmitted to the public space and into the FM radio.
The imagination of the passing by people was feeded by the invisible sources of noises of moved preparates, nightly sounds of animals in the cellar, telephone-talks of biologists about nomenclature of bird names in the inner rooms of the buildings.
Hauser
In Solo-Performances, in collective works and in Soundworks Wendt researched and worked about the Figure „Hauser“ on the edge of being human and animal. 2020 his Radioplay „Hauser-Show“ was awarded with the Jury-Price of Berliner Hörspielfestival.
Brahmaputra — Audiofeature 2020
The living together of people and river experienced on a performancetrip to india 2020 inspired Wendt to speak with different people about their relationship to one of the last big unregulated rivers of the world.
Birds in and around Halle — illustrated Book 2020–2021
work in progress
Stories about a very special culturally formed landscape of the region of former mining and thousands of years of cultivation
ma___g nat__e — 60 min radio laboratory action listen here by Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Ralf Wendt for Meander Lunch
12/12/2020 D21 Gallery / Leipzig, Germany teaser here
For the launch of MEANDER launch and on the topic of sustainability, we decided to discuss in an essay-like manner, similarly to our format Exile-Exhale-Exit also premiered in ODD, a topic we are both interested in namely the idea of nature and what making it could presume.
We reflected out loud from the tight and limited imagination in Europe, what possibly activates people world-wide to keep an environment pleasurable. We think most often of people, birds and grains, mostly that we met or tasted. Our imagination on sustainability is coming straight from our memory and experiences with groups oriented towards a change or conservation through ‘making nature’. In this case, ‘making nature’ or ‘ma___g nat__e’ stands for blurring the denominations between people and nature, natural and artificial, looking for a holistic approach to change, protection and radical perspective on comprehending the environment. ‘ma___g nat__e’ is incomplete, as this mind-moving action aims to be, and it stands for flexible and in motion decision making towards what human-made ideas of nature could be, or even what human-made nature could be.
With Anna Zawadzka, Frank Steinheimer, Alexander Klose; quoting Deccan Development Society, Sangam Radio and David Blackbourn
Our radio action happened in the live radio lab and studio of ‘Anybody out there?!’ 100 years of Radio in Germany, D21 Gallery, Leipzig and will be transmitted regionally on FM and was world-wide spread through the Meander network: ODD, Instituto Procomum , Ensayos
Tenthaus / Oslo, Norway
A ‘Being’ Nature / Natura Creatura / Naturwesen/ […]
Sound and multimedia installation by Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Ralf Wendt arta nonstop Gallery, Astra library and GONG theatre Sibiu
Curated by Iris Ordean
With vocal accounts from Sibiu area:
Simona Lederman, Adriana Chiruta, Monika Tompos, Lucia Sevestrean, Winael Baldus, Kilian Dörr, Hans, Iain Trewby, Cristian Cismaru, Lia Perjovschi, Dan Perjovschi, Viktoria Luft, Joe England, Sandy Stancu, Andreea Madalina Burghelea and more.
A Being Nature — Audioinstallation Pfarrkirche Sibiu 2021
10 hours Animal-voice-surround-composition for the Church
Das Un im Unkraut — The Pest in Pest Plant — Feature for SWR and DFKultur 2021
With Natalia Ferrera (artist), Valentin Kurtenbach (Biologie-Student, Musician), Frank Steinheimer (director of the central collections of natural sciences MLU Halle), Jan Langhammer (Philosopher), Marold Lange-Philippsen (artist), Stephanie Kurtenbach (speech-scientist), Tina Klatte (cultural scientist), Thies Streifinger (gardener, photographer and musician), sounds also by Gustavo Mendez (Artist)