Internecine: The Vanished Musicians, Nishi Gallery, 7th to 25th August
For those that came in late:
For the last three years I’ve been working on an audiovisual project based around refugee musicians from the Second World War, inspired by the 2012 book “Die Verschwundenen Musiker“ by German historian Dr Albrecht Dümling. After reading about the book on Twitter, I contacted the author, who put me in contact with a surviving relative of one “Vanished Musician”.
The Vanished were a group of ninety-six musicians who fled Germany to settle in Australia, many of whom were forced to leave their homeland for playing blacklisted jazz. After internment in the desert as enemy aliens, many were forced to abandon their art when Australian immigration officials insisted on practical labour skills as a condition of entry. Most downplayed their talent to enter safe haven, then disappeared into obscurity - in part because the Australian Musician’s Union deliberately made it difficult for immigrant musicians to work upon arrival. Few ever performed publicly as musicians again.
There were notable exceptions; Jascha Spivakowsky, George Dreyfus, Hermann Schildberger and Werner Baer, amongst others. Cybil Baer, Werner’s widow, allowed me permission to rework some audio I had sourced from The Archive of Australian Judaica, which became a record called ‘Railway Spine’. I travelled to Hay (where a number of the Vanished were interned during WWII) with my family in 2013 and shot some imagery of the Hay Internment and POW Interpretive Centre.
I approached funding bodies and labels over the following twelve months with the project, and the ACT Government bravely funded the concept through their ArtsACT framework in 2014.
The project participants have collectively developed a series of photographs, installations, short films and mixed media artworks to be exhibited at Nishi Gallery at New Acton, Canberra from the 7th to 25th August.
In conjunction with this, three records have been developed, including a creative/procedural generative audio remix project. New York composer Scott Archangel and I arranged a three part string piece based on a piano loop from ‘Railway Spine’s “Damnatio Memoriae”. The parts were recorded at Infidel Studios NSW by Alex Voorhoeve of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, and then distributed internationally to seven sound designers and musicians. Each participant then reworked the arrangements of the previous – “a remix of a remix of a remix”. The development is intended to demonstrate the generational dispersal of The Vanished into Australian lineage and culture, with individual audio works by Antonymes, Markus Mehr, Makee, Glen Knuckles (George Nicholas of Seekae), Almeeva, The New Honey Shade and Danny Grody (of Tarentel and The Drift).
During the exhibition, the stems of their works will be made available (with the video footage shot at the York Piano Cemetary WA) to any interested party for open rework. The results will be uploaded online, and hopefully collated into a digital album.
Proceeds of sales of music and artwork will be donated to refugee charity partners; the ASRC, UNHCR and RACS. Sales of the multimedia DVDs will be directed to the translation of the book to English, with an eye to an Australian publication. RACS have also assisted the project by supplying documentation for use in artworks. I’m luck to have Margo Piefke, Jane Sage, Paul Martin and Tropical Gloom all submit outstanding artwork for the exhibition, and dozens of other artists have been involved in contributory roles, including Isnaj Dui, Nik Harrison, Mick McHugh, and others.
Ian M Hazeldine played a large role in the project, grading video footage, contributing some stunning photography and composing the primary music for the remix project.
I’ll be posting about the project at length over the next 6 to 8 weeks; watch this space!
