Spieldose
Sounding Scultpure | Installation(2017)
Runze Feng
“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.“
- (Betjeman,1960)
Spieldose (Music Box) is a black-stained beechwood sound installation situated on the railway platform of Buchenwald concentration camp—a site where trains once delivered countless inmates to their fate. Its somber 1x1.2x1m exterior, crafted from wood whose German name "Buchenwald" serves as both material and metaphor, encases a vibrant chromatic xylophone embodying the trapped innocence of the camp's children.
Audiences activate the memorial by rotating a crank: this drives an octagonal prism inset with configurable pegs that lift mallets to strike randomly arranged keys, transforming participants into co-creators of spontaneous melodies resonating from the trauma site. These emergent harmonies initiate Gadamer’s "fusion of horizons," where turning the crank becomes a physical engagement with history felt rather than abstracted — acting as Cassirer’s "perceptual vessel." The sculpture orchestrates stark polarities: childhood purity confronts adult barbarism; ephemeral music counters industrialized extermination; life’s fragility echoes through death’s mechanized silence.
Like the sprouting stump on Buchenwald’s grounds, its black shell — reminiscent of of the darking hours — and colorful xylophone manifest history’s continuous reinterpretation, affirming Croce’s maxim that all history is contemporary history. Transcending static remembrance, every improvised melody rewrites collective memory as an act of aktuelles Gedenken (living memorial), demanding we bear witness to voices lost while sounding an urgent alarm: the dehumanizing machinery witnessed here persists wherever humanity averts its gaze — making Spieldose both an elegy for the past and a vibrating thread connecting present sites of suffering.