Ebay DDR

What can a field recording reveal of the past? Are echoes from history preserved in material objects, bodies or voices? How can a memory be (re)presented in sound? And what does it mean to listen to the past? Ebay DDR is a sound work for radio by Berlin-based artist Thomas Lea Clarke that explores the topics of memory, technology, obsolescence and forgotten histories. Using original
radio-cassette players and reel to reel tape machines from the DDR era of East Germany that the artist procured through the popular German second-hand trading website “Ebay Kleinanzeigen”, Clarke blends excerpts of interviews that he conducted with the original owners of those various machines, with their own home-made radio recordings from the 1980s, and field recordings made by the artist in various locations around Berlin. As the voices of the previous owners of the playback devices are played back through the machines themselves, a palimpsestic loop is created where the memory of an object and its use is resounded back through the object itself.
‘Ebay DDR’ features memories of school discos, concerts, clandestinely tuning into the frequencies of western radio stations and the daily life of East Berlin under communism, at a time when music consumption was heavily policed. Overlaid with the songs that soundtracked these years alongside the sounds of the sites of these memories in current-day Berlin, a relational space is opened up where the connections between music, radio, voice, memory, history and society can be explored, deconstructed and re-evaluated.