Revenant is a radio art work in two parts, exploring mortality, rot, and regeneration, using electronic and radiophonic instruments, and field recordings made both below and above ground. A portion of this piece is based on a live remote performance that Anna performed in October 2020 for Indexical (an artist-run center specializing in experimental music and sound art) based in Santa Cruz, California. In addition to pandemic quarantines, Santa Cruz and surrounding communities experienced emergency evacuation during the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire in August 2020. In the following years these communities experienced intensified cycles of flood, regrowth, drought, more devastation from storms, and still more growth on the ground. Behind Anna’s home a meadow is transformed each summer into a gopher barrens – pock-marked with holes and dry as a moonscape as manifested by rodents. She reflected on the urge to go below ground when the air is no longer safe, on what goes on underground in the potentially vast world of creatures and organisms that live in the dark of the earth, and on the recurrent mythical stories of mortal descent into the underworld in search of a lost loved one.
1. Outside
In the increasing heat and haze of summer, the days are long and hot and the nights insomniac. After brief, fitful sleep, the sun is a tarnished penny in the morning when it rises behind an orange haze of smoke and ash from wildfire. Stuck indoors when the air is hot and thick, other creatures find their way inside to take refuge with me: coming in along the plumbing, up the drains, in the vents and down the chimney, through the cracks under the door or the walls. Unexpected insects, worms and a lizard that dry on the floor, various arachnids running up the walls, a small bird, a bat. It seems I must change my approach to cohabitation: when the creatures move into my nest, I take to the airwaves or trade places and try to escape down into their burrows.
2. Revenir
The myth of the living who make the journey to the underworld is a story of unquiet longing. The seeker of visitations becomes a visitor underground. What kind of organism do I need to become to burrow down to the underworld, to seek out lost mortal love? The creatures who move easily through the earth are often considered abject: insects, rodents, serpents, worms. The journey underground requires metamorphosis of body and senses to become that which can survive and burrow into the deeps. Meanwhile, the dead may not lie still but also rehydrate and transform, and one day resurface.
Composition and realisation: Anna Friz
Editor and producer: Elisabeth Zimmermann
Production: Österreichischer Rundfunk 2023
First broadcast on 30.07.2023 on ORF Kunstradio in Ö1
The jury gave the following reasons for their decisions
The Karl Sczuka Prize 2024 goes to the radio piece Revenant by Canadian sound artist Anna Friz (*1970). In the two-part work, Friz explores transience, transformation and recurrence, using electroacoustic techniques and field recordings that also manage to delve into auditory underworlds. The partially live and performance-based „sonic fiction“ uses technologies of radio transmission to make audible an intimate cosmos of physical decay, using narrative elements and sound structures to create an imagination of an acoustic landscape.
122 submissions from 32 countries for the Karl Sczuka Prize 2024
The internationally renowned Karl Sczuka Prize is awarded annually to the ‚best production of an audio work that uses musical material and structures in an acoustic performance‘. This year, 122 submissions were received from 32 countries.
An independent jury chaired by visual artist Olaf Nicolai decided on the winners from 17 June to 20 June 2024 in Baden-Baden. Other jury members were Inke Arns, Julia Cloot, Michael Grote and Thomas Meinecke. Iris Drögekamp, Head of the Karl Sczuka Prize Secretariat, acted as a non-voting advisor to the jury.
The Karl Sczuka Prize is named after the in-house composer of SWF's founding years and was first awarded in 1955.
Anna Friz is a radio, sound, and media artist. She continually returns to themes of transmission ecologies and the intimacies of signal space, environment and land, infrastructures, time perception and durational performance, and critical fictions. She specializes in self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She is Associate Professor in the Film and Digital Media department at University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her Ph.D. in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture from York University Toronto in 2011, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Sound. Her radio artworks have been heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Presentations in recent years include Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), the New York Times Magazine, Heroines of Sound Festival (Berlin), Soundhouse at the Barbican (London), RE:SOUND Festival (Aalborg) and Radio Art Zone (Luxembourg).
