In 2016, David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin (Mollin+Voegelin) were awarded the commission to design and realise a site-specific work for a new replacement build of a primary school in Bern, Switzerland designed and built by Kast Kaeppeli Architekten. For this ‘Kunst am Bau’/‘Art and Architecture’ commission from the Kunstkommission Bern, rather than producing sculptural objects to be placed within the new build, Mollin+Voegelin are working with the mobile and invisible dimension of sound to bring a different awareness to the site and the architecture, and to make audible the temporary and passing nature of place: how it is inhabited and used by the local community, a very multicultural and mainly immigrant and refugee neighbourhood in Bümpliz.

The regeneration of urban areas necessarily involves the removal of the old. This entails the removal of visible buildings and elements, but it also includes the removal of the invisible traces built up over the years through the living experience of local residents within those buildings. A lived-in sense of the environment will have developed its own subliminal timbre, a lived-in texture, which will be removed by an imposed new architectural form upon the local populace. In response, one of the tasks and aims of this invisible Kunst am Bau, Art and Architecture, project is to provide a means to explore and practice new textures from a contingent experience, from memory and the expansive dimensionality of sound. 

The engagement with the building through its sound and the making of sound within it and on its site hopes to provide a sense of authorship for the pupils, and gives the community a stake in the process of their own regeneration while also facilitating ownership and participatio

The project takes its name from the name of the school and its immediate surroundings, called Kleefeld, clover field, and thinks it as a s sound field, a Klangfeld, hence Kleefeld – Klangfeld . It works through infrastructure building (from 2017 – 2022) and participatory interventions (from 2022 – 2027), to make the environment of this newly rebuilt local school into an ‘instrument’ to be listened to and sounded as a Klangfeld, as a sonic field, that makes audible the temporary and passing nature and use of the site: how it is inhabited by the local community in its diversity. 

Mollin+Voegelin have conceptualised a technological infrastructure and are curating a programme of sonic interventions that enables the exploration and transformation of the superstructure of the environment, understood as the architectural, technological and ideological construction of the site, through sonic and musical activities. Thus the project enables the pupils, teachers, administrators, local residents and visitors to engage with its sounds and add their own voices, sounds and rhythms to the built environment.

Since autumn 2022, with the infrastructure in place, the project enables five artists: Jan Schacher, Antye Greie-Ripatti , Rahel Kraft, Gilles Aubrey, and Cathy von Eck to work with the children and the school over five years. Bringing a sonic sensibility and practice to the everyday experience of learning and teaching, and producing collaborative sound art works that will be performed on site and exhibited elsewhere and in further incarnations curated by Mollin+Voegelin

artist who will work with the school over the next five years are:

• Jan Schacher .
• Antye Greie-Ripatti
• Cathy Van Eck
• Rahel Kraft
• Gilles Aubry