Artist: Nick Sowers
Title: the audio cemetery of Omaha Beach | ©
Date: 2009
Duration: 8′40
photo by: Nick Sowers
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THE SOUND
This is an audio cemetery. Audio cemeteries exist where marked graves are prohibited. Audio cemeteries are the opposite of tombstone cemeteries. They are composed of fleeting trajectories, dissipating before an image of a memorial can be formed. They seek to redefine the memorial of the dead by their infinite reproducibility and economy of reproduction. At the top of Omaha Beach, St. Laurent-sur-Mer, Normandy, sits the American cemetery of white tombstones shaped as crosses and shaped as Stars of David. 9,387 dead lay beneath the grass. You must pass through a metal detector and security check before entering, as though at an airport, or an embassy checkpoint. The American cemetery is fortified. By contrast, on the slopes leading up to the cemetery from the beach, are the remains of German-built concrete bunkers, their concrete exoskeletons broken by bombs, feeble and eroding in the wind. While a stile sits atop one of the bunkers honoring the American 5th Engineer Special Brigade, nothing remains to honor the Germans who lived in these husks of concrete for endless months. They died defending this beach. They were human, too. This is a guided tour through the German audio-cemetery at Omaha Beach: invisible to the eye, visceral to the ear.
THE ARCHITECT
Nick Sowers is practicing the construction of space, using sound and 2×4s alike, in the San Francisco Bay area. As a Master of Architecture student from UC Berkeley he has been traveling around the world on a fellowship studying militarized spaces and their potential for re-use.
links: www.soundscrapers.com | www.archinect.com
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