“Chundua – Froschträume” is a site-specific installation for the historic lecture hall of the Museum Koenig Bonn with 6 planar loudspeakers (IDMT Ilmenau), 85 table-mounted loudspeaker objects and 29 channel audio.
In the spring of 2022 Robin Minard, City Sound Artist Bonn 2022, traveled to the rainforest in northern Colombia on a biological research expedition. While there he recorded the sounds of the rainforest, especially the great diversity of frogs that live in the area. For the indigenous Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, frogs are associated with water, the source of life, and are therefore considered to be especially sacred animals.
Chundua, a mountainous region of the Sierra Nevada, is the heart of the world for the Arhuaco. In their tradition, life, wisdom and law originate here. They believe that all people need Chundua. But in the same way, Chundua needs people and their conscious caring for the environment in order to maintain the earth’s balance.
The sound installation “Chundua – Frog Dreams” is inspired by an Arhuaco story about the inhabitants of the Sierra Nevada. It is said that they lie in their hammocks and imagine themselves suspended between the real and the spiritual world. In accordance with this, the exhibition presents acoustic images of the Colombian rainforest in dream-like sequences in which materials are mixed and transformed through memory and imagination.
This exhibition is the first project of ECHOES – Soundforum Bonn of the Beethoven Foundation for Art and Culture of the Federal City of Bonn, which combines artistic and scientific research. For the 2022 theme of biodiversity, Robin Minard worked closely with the Herpetology Research Section at the Museum Koenig Bonn of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB).
Presentations
- 2022: Museum Koenig Bonn (site specific). Opening: 31.08.2022 / Exhibition 01.09.-04.12.2022 / Extended to 29.01.2023
