MARC BEHRENS / Entity Mülheim
[AATP22]
Released by aufabwegen, February 2007.

Limited edition of 500 copies, 2 DVDs, region free, NTSC, plus 12 page booklet with texts in german, english and turkish.

Double DVD release documenting a sound installation dealing with the suburb Muelheim in the City of Cologne. Based on field recordings, interviews with the population and photographs the sound/video-installtion presented a very personal but nevertheless insightful portrait of this diverse urban area. The sound installation was commissioned by kulturbunker muelheim e.v. as part of the festival muelheim klingt in 2005.

It was presented in the form of a dual screen/monitor and four speaker environment. the double dvd format aims to recreate these original circumstances; the two discs can be played simultaneously.
[excerpt from:] AUDIOVISUAL ENTITIES. In 1998 I began to work on a series of installations which pick out a particular location as their central theme, to determine it by means of its sonic appearance and at the same time to define their sound as an entity (a being, an essence).
The first one of these works ENTITY INM (1998) was released on my CD FOUR INSTALLATIONS and consisted of a 6-channel audio processing of sounds from a server room at INM-Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt am Main. The sounds, thoroughly filtered and distributed over two floors and an elevator shaft, were diffused back into the building, so that the impression of a fourdimensional sound entity was created, moving through the building.

ENTITY K (2002) was a simple sound installation controlled by a motion detector in an exhibition space for jewellery (Schmuckmanufaktur Kneist, Darmstadt). Short successive compositions, appearing like individual pearls on a thread, were switched on and off by the movement of the spectators.
ENTITY MÜLHEIM (2005�2006) is a commission for Kulturbunker M�lheim e.V. (for the Mülheim klingt/Mülheimer Profile festival in autumn 2005), which was presented as an audiovisual installation and that is now available as a double DVD.

The location to be determined here is not a single building or a single space, but a district of Cologne, which is characterized in two ways: through two individuals, who could be regarded as typical for the two biggest population groups in M�lheim (on the one hand the German population, on the other hand the Turkish immigrants respectively the integrated Turkish Germans, first- through third-generation) and by its architectural and urban conditions. The latter are also affected by social and ecomonic circumstances.
As a starting point for the work, a Turkish mother, about 40 years old, and a circa 60-year-old German man were confronted with four questions about the representative of the respectively other population group and about the district Mülheim itself.

The answers, recorded to video, were scrambled, their time structure dissolved into inconsistency, so that sound fragments and syllables are heard, but no discernible language can be made out, sound and video recordings were attributed to the two different persons in blocks, some of them directly referring to what was said in the interviews. That way two complementary audiovisual compositions evolved, one of which is attibuted to the German, the other to the Turkish aspects of Mülheim-two similar, but unequal sides of the same object…