Bewilderung is a geolocated sound installation and can be heard via an app on your mobile phone: Echoes.xyz at the Güterbahnhof – Areal für Kunst und Kultur, Bremen.

A handmade ‘songbook’ assembles the poems written for this audio walk in German and English language. The project will continue and eventually be released as a record.

Poems, herbarium, and translations: © Gabi Schaffner
Proofreading: Kate Donovan, Helen Thein
Graphics: Tiger Stangl
Printing and binding: Marion Bösen

We are the wilderness under your feet. Unasked for, usually uninvited

We are manifold, inconspicuous, tiny, unknown and nameless (for most of you humans). 
Among us, we keep company with the ants and earthworms, chat with the sand bees and the wasps 
Among us we trade grains of sand for wilted leaves and remnants of organic matter.
Among us we share the seasons and weather, the chemicals and the iron dust of the rails.
Among us, inaudible to your ears, we suck the sunlight into our cells and breathe quietly onto the asphalt. 
Among us, there are trade routes trafficking countless seeds and sagas. 
Where you tread on us 
Where tyres press us into the dirt, 
we stay small, our flowers keep their heads low. 
Where we can thrive along the roadsides, 
in corners overlooked by the efficient minds (of your generation), 
in deserted warehouses 
we sprout from cracks in the ground. 

Into the cracks of human consciousness, 
we send forth our roots and shoots, 
and all sorts of seeds 
that spiral featherlike down the hallways of your dreams: 
We are wilderness as long as we are strangers, fellow creatures once you see us, 
a sanctuary once you need us.   - And you will.