Tag Archives: Güterbahnhof Bremen

Recents, writing

Songbook ‘Bewilderung’

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.
News, Sound Art Radio

Bewilderung

„Bewilderung“, by Gabi Schaffner

GPS-based audio walk on the wild and cultivated plants of the Künstlerhaus Güterbahnhof [freight train station] Bremen. EN/DE. Permanent exhibition, 3 years minimum.

Via a free ‘app’ (echoes.xyz) installed on your mobile phone, < 6 compositions can be listened to while walking among the plantings on the grounds of the Güterbahnhof art and culture area. 

The focus is on a selection of wild plants that, although ubiquitous and indispensable to the insect world, are ‘blank slates’ in their (medicinal, ecological, historical) peculiarities for most city dwellers: Evening Primrose, Mugwort, Yarrow, Mullein, Wild Carrot, etc.

The compositions approach the respective plant in different ways: in dialogues, as sonification, via onomatopoeia, song, narration, and field recording.

The aim is a series of musical pieces that convey a sensory-poetic experience of the wild plant world – including its communications and secrets invisible to the human eye. The installation will be open to the public and accessible around the clock from the 18th of September 2022 on

Sound Art Radio, works

Music4Trains

Everyone knows trains. They take you from A to B. And possibly back.
The train is a myth, not only as a means of transportation, but also as a reinvention of the concepts of time and speed. A train can also be considered as a narrative – with an open end and an open beginning. In between: a time-stream filled with acoustic imagery.

Kunstfrühling Bremen 2014. Galerie Herold.
Gabi Schaffner: Music4Trains – Installation and performance with Ansgar Wilken; Installation and intervention: The Fado Hour
Kuratiert von: Marion Bösen
Installation: 4 CD players, 64 Speakers in 4 clusters
Performance: with Ansgar Wilken (Cello)
Vinyl-Edition: 10 copies. Dubplate & handprinted cover.
Price 120 Euro (1 left)

  • 10 individually printed silkscreen record covers
  • Ansgar Wilken. Photos: Jens Weyers
  • On my way to performing
  • Unpacking a suitcase

In Music4Trains, the acoustic qualities of environmental, accidental sounds are used as musical elements. In turn, selected samples from the canon of modern composition got freed from their original structure and shred down to fragments of noise. I did so to show my appreciation for work already done in the field of “locomotive music”. At the same time, this rather casual choice reflects the thorough omission of another thousand of musical works done on trains.
The ‘classic’ fragments were spliced, looped, speeded up or down, hacked into, turned over or reversed, until they turned into an acoustic debris not unlike the stuff you find in the trackbeds between the blackish grid and those patches of sturdy, uncompromising vegetation.
Conversations, phone calls on platforms, loudspeaker announcements, children’s screams, the sticky scent of human presence. A violin played at Hauptwache Frankfurt, an opera singer practising in an underpass somewhere in New Zealand, Hamburg’s main station anti-junky classic muzak, freight trains passing through Bremen and Gießen stations, Polish workers taking their leave from Berlin. I have been travelling u-tube videos, sampling away on Hungarian passenger trains and on the archives of freesound.org. And I taped this sad and furious old lady on a train to Vienna.

I am in love with breaches, flaws, mistakes, gaps and of course: noise. All of this connect us to the intangible fleeting beauty of our daily lives that are made up of noises, sounds and an all-pervading music.
More unused field recordings of trains and stations rumble about on my hard drives, shifting there like restless sleepers in their digital trackbeds. These four pieces are what came into being for now. Anything more you’ll have to make up yourself.