Viva Arte Viva, 57. Venice Biennial  13. Mai – 26. November 2017

For the Venice Biennial Nevin Aladag restages Raise The Roof which was performed for the first time in Berlin in 2007 on a rooftop in the former border section between West and East Berlin.
Seven female dancers leave their traces on the copper stages with their stiletto
shoes while dancing to given songs, played on their headphones. The audience can read the different titles on the shirts of the dancers. What the audience hears is a rhythmic sound produced by the stiletto steps. Each dancer produces another frequency of a
drum set, from high hat to bass drum.

On three separate projection surfaces, Aladağ creates a large-scale sound-and-image portrait of the city of Stuttgart, the place she spent her childhood and adolescence. Here we encounter, for instance, an accordion that plays as it unfolds along the length of a lamppost, or a frame drum that rolls loudly through a park landscape. A flute trills asit sails off into the sky with a balloon; the chestnuts in a chestnut tree play a gong and a violin turns on a merry-go-round. Traces is fascinating especially in moments of the orchestrated interaction of only partially controllable sounds. Are sound and image coming together here to tell a tale? As surprisingly as a symphonic interplay seems to arise, it disintegrates just as quickly back into cacophony. The artist has neither designed a soundscape of pure noise, nor has she composed an interpretive piece about the city. Rather, Aladağ has invented a remarkable hybrid. The most disparate urban situations become the players in an orchestra. Rocking horses in the pedestrian zone and the slopes of vineyards, downhills on the main street and a carousel in a playground constitute the ensemble that, under Aladağ’s direction, performs an audio rendition of their city on the accordion, drum, flute and violin – and elicits wholly unexpected possibilities from each classical instrument.