ME+BeFallen
Text-driven audio installation and live audio performance
Installationsansicht
Overview
ME+BeFallen is a site-specific audio installation that allows visitors to experience the infestation, decay, and transformation of an Upper Franconian spruce forest from more-than-human perspectives. Created in close collaboration with visual artist Anna Kubelík, the project unfolds across exhibition and performance contexts, interweaving ecological, economic, and speculative time horizons.
Depending on the context, the work appears in various presentation formats, such as a series of spoken monologues combined with visual works or spatial setups. These create individual or collective listening situations in which voice, material imprint, and spatial arrangement are brought into relation. The project is conceived without a fixed sequence and frames listening as a situated, spatially embedded experience.
Audio previews (excerpts)
EN: ME+BeFallen 1 — Anna’s Spruce
DE: ME+BeFallen 2 — Kupferstecher
The previews are curated excerpts. Full-length tracks are available in the exhibition context and on request.
Five perspectives
- Anna’s Spruce — a spruce tree speaks from within its own material body, sensing growth, connection, drought, and infestation as slow internal processes.
- Engraver (Bark Beetle) — the beetle speaks as a collective process, tracing heat, drought, and weakened resistance through the inner layers of the tree.
- Forest Savings Book — a forest owner reflects on responsibility, inheritance, and economic calculation within a fragile forestry system.
- Capitalist Ruin — set in a dystopian near future (2080), a mushroom picker navigates survival amid the ruins of extractive economic systems.
- In the Chthulucene — a mycelial network speaks from a distant speculative future, imagining relational forms of coexistence beyond human-centered worlds.
Presentations
- ME+BeFallen, audio installation — Symbiotic Wood, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). 28 June – 21 September 2025, extended until 23 November 2025.
- IM AUGENBLICK – BeFALLEN, KLAGG artspace Dresden. 11 July – 6 August 2025, extended until 18 September 2025. (Audio access via QR code on personal devices; incl. streaming and readable text versions.)
- ME+BeFallen — Live audio performance, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin (finissage, Symbiotic Wood). 23 November 2025, approx. 20 minutes.
CREDITS
- Text & sound design: Tarik Goetzke
- Voice (all roles): Anna Kubelík
- Prints: Anna Kubelík
- Production: KubelíkGoetzke
Extended
Read more
ME+BeFallen was developed in the context of the exhibition Symbiotic Wood, which is part of the More than Human series at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin. The project was realized in collaboration with the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for the _matter Festival 2025.
The point of departure is a spruce forest in Upper Franconia that has been severely affected for years by drought, storms, and bark beetle infestation. This site is biographically motivated while also serving as an exemplary case study of the consequences of the human-made climate crisis and monocultural forestry practices. ME+BeFallen translates this concrete experience into a multi-perspective narrative intertwining individual involvement, ecological processes, and speculative futures.
The texts draw on contemporary forestry science as well as multi-species and more-than-human approaches, including Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble.
Following ME+Rome (Villa Massimo, 2017) and ME+Beijing (Goethe-Institut, 2018), ME+BeFallen is the third collaborative audio work by Tarik Goetzke and Anna Kubelík within the ongoing ME+ series.