Angel View is an assemblage of urban and musical debris, somewhere between a wordless live radio play, enacted film soundtrack and instrumental theatre, composed by Juliana Hodkinson. Chiseling cement, falling debris, scraping cutlery, breaking glass, crisscrossing cables, squealing tram-wheels, an upturned bicycle, a travel souvenir, a shop window, a revolving carousel, a brace of monkeys, a wall under siege, a dining table laid for an ancestral dinner – it is a sonic bazaar. Made up of many parts, each designed to overlap, the work’s architecture is full of non-sequiturs and arbitrary cross-relations between imagined streets intersecting and running parallel, reflecting the surrealism of everyday life described in Walter Benjamin’s “Einbahnstrasse” and still present in the contemporary dilemmas and opportunities of Berlin today. All this is heard as if from an aerial perspective – perhaps the Victory Column where angels sit in Wings of Desire – from where Berlin below is observed as a series of tragedies, as witnessed by Benjamin’s angel of history.
