Echo of Spring

Immersive Soundscape and Ambient Sound Composition, Miro Platform ‚Together~Valuable!‘, Gwangju, South Korea

In May 1980, Gwangju rose up against military dictatorship – a democratic uprising brutally suppressed between the 18th and 27th of May. Forty years later: an acoustic search for traces at sites that became silent witnesses to violence – among them the former military hospital where demonstrators were tortured, with its old soldiers‘ chapel whose rusty bell the artist set ringing again after decades of silence. Or the Sangmugwan, a former police sports hall where the bodies of the dead were laid out. Using cello improvisations and impulse responses – brief sonic impulses resembling a single gunshot – he captured the resonance of these places and returned the voices of eyewitnesses to the very rooms where history had unfolded.

„Echo of Spring“ thus follows in the footsteps of international journalists such as Jürgen Hinzpeter, who documented at risk to their lives what military censorship sought to conceal. The composition weaves together spatial atmospheres, archival material and interviews into a layered sonic fabric – a journey through time that brings the past back to life. Approaching a trauma from the outside, the work proceeds with care and allows the spirit of hope that refused to be silenced, even amid the violence, to resonate within the acoustically reconstructed spaces. An echo of that spring whose reverberations have never fully faded.