Interview: Heiner Goebbels about Surrogate Cities



 
Hugo Hamilton about Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities

We like to think of the modern metropolis as having a soul, a living heart, a pulse. The city has always contained human qualities. But is this not also true in reverse? Does our behaviour and our neurosis not reflect the clatter of our cities? The city is a living thing. It breathes. It keeps the beat. It has trouble sleeping at night. 

It possesses human energy, human characteristics and human failings. It has a mind full of idiosyncratic logic, full of memory coming up through the streets, full of shining dreams and homelessness. Even the graffiti is an act of belonging.

In reverse, the human mind has now taken on all the messy features of the city. We have developed a mentality of clustering and privacy, of public spaces and park benches to be alone. We think in patterns of safety and adventure. We abandon parts of ourselves like electrical appliances thrown down a railway embankment. We have graffiti written on to our bodies. We hear the city inside our heads like an atonal symphony, full of clanking and scraping and silences between. Perhaps, too, we may now have reached an evolutionary moment in which our technology has turned the earth into one large virtual city, forever connected and disparate at the same time. It feels like standing at the centre of a traffic island, with the noise of the world all around us.


Published with the kind permission of the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen.








Press reviews

Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung | 22 May 2017 
„Combining elements deriving from different worlds of sounds that create a sense of unity, Goebbel’s strongly collaged work links back to the first concert of the festival […].”

Neue Presse | 22 May 2017
„The sound track gurgles, pulsates, speeds, becomes frantic and rarely comes to rest – a greater sense of city, of factory can hardly be described by music.” 

composer profile: Heiner Goebbels