1 + 5 = A14. With the “Ortsgespräche” series, the Schenkung Sammlung Hoffmann organizes exhibitions together with actors in the so-called rural areas. The cooperation partners each select a contemporary work of art from the Sammlung Hoffmann or the Schenkung Hoffmann and invite five artistic positions to enter into a dialogue by being inspired by the selected work to create a new piece of art.

Whether form, content or material, the choice of artwork is often determined by a theme that is significant for the respective location. For the artists' estate in Prösitz, the theme was the Autobahn 14, which passes close by the village between Leipzig and Dresden. In the run-up to the exhibition “SCHALL_WALL”, the artists chose the video work “Accelerated Heavens” (2001) by Israeli artist Rivka Rinn. Against the background noise of a car race, the Berlin-based artist has photographic snapshots of her everyday life and her travels - whether by plane, train or car - run in rapid succession, creating the impression of great unrest.

Based on Rinn's work, the “SCHALL_WALL” project at Künstlergut Prösitz has created sound-based artistic responses to the neighboring freeway, which has dominated social life in the village for decades. All five sculptors have approached the contemporary concept of sculpture from the perspective of sound. As an invisible phenomenon, sound shapes shared spaces and thus also shapes our social life, because we react - albeit subconsciously - to it. The “SCHALL_WALL” exhibition includes works that they developed during their stay in the 80-people community.

In her multi-part work, Anna Holzhauer turns the village of Prösitz into a stage. The artist covers large hay bales with bright red fabric and positions them - as the title suggests - at certain “places” (2024) in the village. The oversized sculptures invite visitors to walk around, climb on and sit on them and mark the places selected by the artist as nodes that open up a sound axis to the highway and allow visitors to consciously perceive the place and the soundscape of the highway and relate to it.

A group of residents gathers and listens to the A14 for a while, then the group begins to improvise and respond vocally to the chorus of cars that is unique to the highway. Artist Grit Ruhland and singer Walburga Walde use the highway as a productive moment and make it possible to find a new, vocal approach to it. Ruhland and Walde have compiled the audio piece “Autobahn-Chor-Projekt” (2024) from visual and audio material collected during their stay, which captures the process that took place in Prösitz.

In her works, Frauke Eckhardt utilizes the noise pollution of urban and rural spaces. In “traveling_infra” (2024), the artist converted a caravan on the Prösitz artist's estate into a sound object and mobile lecture hall, making the 8-track composition of various highway and transfer noises physically tangible while lying down. In other works exhibited in Prösitz, Eckhardt also reinterprets disturbing noises and condenses the location acoustically and visually, as in “rush 2” (2021), when passing trucks merge into a sea noise in the distorted image of the reflective sound membrane.

During her stay in Prösitz, artist and linguist Christina Stark conducted interviews with local residents about their lives with noise. In her questions, Stark traced the coping strategies for dealing with the noise of the nearby highway. From the answers, the artist weaves together the noise-speech collage “bruitorganismus, still” (2024) on thin strips of paper, which becomes an interactive installation when the exhibition visitors themselves become active in order to rummage through the collection of syllables, words and sentences, read them and enter into a conversation about their own noise biography.

The artist Anna Schimkat's research led her to the paths that disappeared in Prösitz. In the video work “Die A14 bei Prösitz” (2024), the artist uses historical maps to explore the route that was interrupted by the construction of the highway. Not far from the artist's estate, Schimkat installed her sound intervention “Kirschen” (2024) below the highway. In a small, hidden watercourse that runs under the highway, longing songs resound from the overgrown pipe, which also sing of places of longing that can be found in the stories of local residents and tell of the old school path lined with cherry trees, which - interrupted by the highway - now ends in the stream.