Pavilion Encounter Iced Sound

The story of unseen and unheard fragile landscapes

​​Since 2019, composer Ramon Landolt has visited several Alpine glaciers. At the heart of this project lies sound from these different field recordings, taken on-site while listening to and interacting with glacier caves and seracs, crevasses, and glacial lakes, resulting in a unique sonic experience. The Morteratsch-, Zinnal- and Rhône glacier have been visited both in summer and winter to perceive the changing sonic environment. Glacial caves are unpredictable entities because they appear during melting processes until winter freezes their current form, only to possibly disappear in spring again.

The pavilion as public room

The pavilion, designed by rotative studio (Alexandra Sonnemans and Caterina Viguera), provides an acoustic environment to the ‘music by and for glaciers’ by composer Ramon Landolt. The spatial expression of the pavilion reflects, and makes experienceable, that what we can not see, and in this case, hear: the story of unseen and unheard fragile landscapes, that are gradually, but also ever faster, changing, as a result of our own human actions, which has major consequences for our planet. The pavilion, with its subjective acoustical and visual voice, embodies this tension, as a sonic exploration of the climate crisis. The modular wooden pavilion, connected by wood joints (wooden dowels and dado joints), has been designed as a ‘public room’, where everybody can approach the topic at their own pace, yet always in a simultaneity of urban and remote alpine sounds, like a glacier talking to the city. (Encounter Iced Sound Pavilion has been displayed at the center of Zürich during the month of March 2023 and has received the support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.)