Radio Art Zone # Christina Ertl-Shirley: Salix matsudana Tortuosa
Radio Art Zone is a 100-day radio art station by Radio ARA and Mobile Radio for the European Capital of Culture, Esch2022. It is broadcast in the south of Luxembourg by Radio ARA on 87.8 FM. It is also live-streamed for a worldwide audience and transmitted by a network of international partners.
22 hours with the recalcitrant corkscrew willow A plot of land near Berlin on which stands a half-felled corkscrew willow (Salix matsudana Tortuosa). The tree, which was many meters tall before being cut back and often attracted attention with its "curly" branches, was planted in 1974 and had to be cut down to a 90cm trunk two years ago due to city regulations.
Passing walkers always mourn around this beautiful tree, but are also amused by its unruliness: The remaining trunk sprouts again and again and countless red-green shoots grow out of it in the most diverse variations, which then must be trimmed again immediately so that no real branches form. The trimmed tree seems more active than ever and has become a favorite habitat for insects, birds and tree fungi and perhaps other species. Its sawed-off jagged branches, which have been converted to fences, are also beginning to sprout regularly.
For Radio Art Zone, this corkscrew willow becomes a sound producer itself for 22 hours, as I sonify its biological processes, and capture the sounds of its inhabitants and environment. In this soundscape, facts, anecdotes, songs, poems, dreams, and conversations around the tree interweave and become a multidimensional narrative. For this I use material from archives, realize my own willow compositions and invite musicians, people out for a walk, poets and tree experts to stay next to the tree trunk and listen to what they have to share with me inspired by the recalcitrant corkscrew willow.
Christina Ertl-Shirley creates audio-visual narratives in the form of sound installations, radio plays, drawings, radio features, short stories, and compositions (based on field recordings and analog synthesisers). She sees her works as transmedia explorations with experimental approaches to the sharing of knowledge. She is particularly concerned with the interweaving of nature, art, and technology, immersing herself in the respective microcosms, such as the world of the animal "paper nautilus", the cultural history of the elevator, the environment of wooden beetles in the Berlin forest or the discipline of moss research.
The starting point for her work is traveling these niches through scientific, historical, and subjective material. She draws on the suggestive possibilities of these elements and comments on them through her own acoustic, visual and haptic investigations, realizing artistic narratives from them.