Lawrence MUSIC FOR PLANTS / ICC, Berlin / 10 October 2021

Lawrence MUSIC FOR PLANTS / Internationales Congress Centrum Berlin (ICC) / Sunday, 10 October 2021, 15:00-17:40 / Is it possible to activate the communication between plants with music? In his sound installation with live interventions “Music for Plants (ICC)“ Peter M. Kersten aka Lawrence transposes his laboratory of sound and plants to the auditorium in Saal 2. Numerous scientific studies have shown that plants react to sound waves: a mechanical impulse that stimulates the membrane surrounding these multicellular organisms. As a trained landscape gardener, Lawrence makes use of this knowledge and creates with the aid of a computer, tape recordings, vibraphone, and percussion, subtle acoustics that combine research into the networks of permacultures with his musicmaking in tangible form. His sound installation “Music for Plants (ICC)” in Saal 2 follows on from the album he released last year ‘Music for Plants I+II’ (Dial) and allows this to be appreciated afresh. / The Sun Machine Is Coming Down - Art at the ICC: For ten days, the Berliner Festspiele are opening the International Congress Centre (ICC), which has been unused for years, and will bring this High-Tech architectural icon back to life with Berlin-based and international artists featuring new and adapted art from the fields of performance, circus, music, film, and installation. There, where today the aura of what was once state-of-the-art technology has faded, where operations have come to a standstill, and where the deterioration of the building dominantes its presence, bodies, plants, sounds, discourses, and movement are returning, and - with a project named after the title of David Bowie’s song “Memory of a Free Festival” (1969) - are promising light, space, and transformation. At the beginning, there was the desire to make the ICC, which is like a spaceship stranded and floating through time while running on emergency power, able to be experienced as a vessel to other worlds and species. The crackling of time, the groaning of the machine, the echo of the goods of earlier and other cultures - all of this was intended to flow through the ICC as sounds. Eerie, disturbing, and seductive, all at the same time.