Film ‘What Does Democracy Sound Like?’ (Klaus Karlbauer 33 min, © 2024)
Art & democracy, what do they have in common? They are threatened! Who cares? The composer/multimedia artist Klaus Karlbauer looked and listened around and engaged with young people to collectively work out an art & democracy status. In multimedia form, in picture, sound, text, and performance. The plurality, the diversity of voices, the conflicting and even the dissonant things were to be rendered visible, audible and perceptible: therefore, a choir! A choir of diversity, however, without the blissful harmony of the Carinthian choir tradition.
Following a series of live events (performances, exhibitions, a fashion show, etc.), Klaus Karlbauer has now completed a 33-minute film that combines all aspects of the multimedia democracy choir into an audiovisual composition.
‘At the beginning of my project there was the call “Get out of your bubbles!” Many have followed that call, some have left their bubbles behind and have set out, have begun the adventure of an expedition into the unknown, into uncertainty. Others have returned to their comfort zones because that is where they feel safe, apparently protected, sheltered like by the single-family house that many call their lifelong dream. Others again have created new bubbles, with strict rules determining what is right and what is wrong, who is in and who is not, that in their rigidity are almost cult-like.’
To what extent are we able to take steps towards each other, to keep the channels of communication open when our comfort zones are challenged, when dissonance makes its appearance?
No piece of music without dissonance, no film, no stage drama, no biography, no life. We are well advised to acquire a taste for dissonance.
‘Somewhere else
the houses crack,
the bodies, the dreams.
Nothing cracks here but the Carinthian song.’ (Ada Karlbauer)