Radio Solaris


East Berlin Radio Station In a socialist country, the radio station was, so to speak, an experimental device in the city, in which nature, the world, and our existence were kept frozen and reproduced by the media through sounds only. To everyoneﾕs surprise, in then state-of-the-art institution given all available technologies as a recording machine of the materialistic ideology as the social realism, an enormous space like an orchestra hall for recording was designed to hang in midair to avoid noise. Now the building itself is the remains of the past, and almost no one uses this empty space. How is this building viewed in a historical context of Berlin, a leading city in the EU economic block as the capital of Germany having experienced the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany? In this media-architectural installation, Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani focus on Andrej Tarkovsky's film "Solaris" (1972, the original novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem) that strongly reflects the thought of the Communist block in the Cold War times, while, by contrast, trying to attain the motif of universal human existence. There, the ruins of the "Radio Stationﾓ of East Germany and the probe spaceship of ﾒSolarisﾓ are overlapped in the installation. Here arises a question about whether or not the two (one is an unknown celestial body "Solaris" that materializes the marked traces through all human memories, and the other is today's society reproducing all existences through information and media) are actually far apart. The "Radio Station" was designed to use the technology to reproduce the real existences through only sounds without vision, as the ultimate technology. Here, Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani try carefully to gain insight into some hope and crisis in the contemporary times is, just as the approaches to the unachievable are applied and translated into media technologies.

East Berlin Radio Station

In a socialist country, the radio station was, so to speak, an experimental device in the city, in which nature, the world, and our existence were kept frozen and reproduced by the media through sounds only. To everyoneﾕs surprise, in then state-of-the-art institution given all available technologies as a recording machine of the materialistic ideology as the social realism, an enormous space like an orchestra hall for recording was designed to hang in midair to avoid noise. Now the building itself is the remains of the past, and almost no one uses this empty space. How is this building viewed in a historical context of Berlin, a leading city in the EU economic block as the capital of Germany having experienced the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany?

In this media-architectural installation, Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani focus on Andrej Tarkovsky's film "Solaris" (1972, the original novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem) that strongly reflects the thought of the Communist block in the Cold War times, while, by contrast, trying to attain the motif of universal human existence. There, the ruins of the "Radio Stationﾓ of East Germany and the probe spaceship of ﾒSolarisﾓ are overlapped in the installation. Here arises a question about whether or not the two (one is an unknown celestial body "Solaris" that materializes the marked traces through all human memories, and the other is today's society reproducing all existences through information and media) are actually far apart. The "Radio Station" was designed to use the technology to reproduce the real existences through only sounds without vision, as the ultimate technology. Here, Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani try carefully to gain insight into some hope and crisis in the contemporary times is, just as the approaches to the unachievable are applied and translated into media technologies.

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