georg klein : : peregrinatio paradiso

... had neyther shape nor hew
The topic of the sound walk are imaginations of the paradise, often described as a beautiful, peaceful garden. On the 2 hours walk different types of gardens can be experienced: an old cementary, allotment gardens, parks with forest, english garden.
The paradise as a vision and utopia needs the potency of imagination, on this walk stimulated in an acoustic way. Beside the visual and acoustic reality there appears a fictive listening world, mingled with the real world and transforming it. The recordings were made in a special stereophonic way to get a very realistic space imagination. Things can be heard which canot be seen – a situation blind people know very well. And blind and deaf-blind people are the interview partners asked for their imagination of the paradise. They are telling – the deaf-blind people supported by a translator – their surprising visions. Together with these interviews some other texts and poems appear in the 2 hours sound walk, reflecting good and bad imaginations of the myth of paradise.

...they lived safe without a Judge
The sound walk starts at the famous cementary of Hannover (Engesohde), passing the grave of Kurt Schwitters, continues through allotment gardens and the twon forest Eilenriede, passing the School for blind people, then through the Hermann-Löns-Park (built by the Nazis in the 1930s) and finishes the Deaf-blind Home. This walk is separated in two parts (A+B) with totally 24 stations. Visitors can get a MP3-player or can use their own.

...no towne enclosed yet, with walles and diches deepe
In this acoustic collage of sounds and interviews the voice of the german actress Angela Winkler appears with a text out of Ovids 'Metamorphoses', in a first reading: "Das goldene Zeitalter / The Golden Age", an imagination of a paradise, quiet revolutionary: compared with the christian, jewish or muslim paradise and also with the modern utopias (including the national socialistic idyll of home and nature which was prepared earlier by Hermann Löns) it's a paradise without walls, without law, without a controlled entrance, without preconditions for staying and without any 'civilisation' process with an untouched nature. It is more than surprising that the most blind and deaf-blind interview partners are telling a similar imagination of their paradise.

...the fertile earth as yet was free, untoucht of spade or plough. (Ovid)
At the first day the participants got a special version of the sound walk: the last 100m near the Deaf-blind Home they got a blindfold, and isolated by this visually and by the earphones acoustically they had to go on, supported by the deaf-blind inhabitants of the home, only using the tactile sense.