Feature

Robert Montgomery on SEAROCK SONGLINES

06 May 2015

by ArtRabbit

On the 9th of May 2015, Scottish artist Robert Montgomery, in cooperation with Saalfelden Leogang and Epicentro Art Berlin, will unveil his first public installation in Austria: SEAROCK SONGLINES is where poetry meets public sculpture

Addressing a small audience in Berlin, among them representative of Saalfelden Leogang Caroline Hechenberger, and curator and private collector Marc Fiedler, Robert spoke of his decision to install his most recent work in Saalfelden Leogang.

Here is what he had to say:

Saalfelden Leogang is a beautiful place, in winter for skiing, and in summer a beautiful place to go to the jazz festival. The landscape is really special and beautiful. When we arrived in January it was like a winter wonderland out of a christmas card. And it really has this sense of beeing like a sublime outline landscape – it is like a Caspar David Friedrich painting coming alive.

That is all fine but you'll probably never understand the culture of a holiday place unless you dig deeper in the history of that place. And what I really love about that place is that Saalfelden Leogang is – archaeologically speaking – the site of an ancient Roman village on one side of the mountain valley, and on the other side there was a Celtic village.

I love the idea of an early urban civilization. And obviously – being Scottish – I am a great partizan to the Celts and very against to the Romans.

I love that aspect.

So we tried to choose a site for the sculpture that is between those two villages and all those tracks and pathways between them.

This piece for me is very connected to a Celtic, Scottish, pagan tradition of pagan religion that pre-dates Christianity. So before the Romans came to Britain and uncivilized us to be Christians, we have been very happy Pagans. We had lots of gods – one god for happiness, one god for sadness, one god for laughter, one god for sex, one god for war, one god for winter and one for summer….

and in Scotland where I grew up we had fire festivals that marked the four seasons of the year. So already in my work there is what I think is a reference to this Celtic tradition. I love the fact that we are working in a place in the Alps that has a Celtic history.

What is the altitude of Saalfelden Leogang?
Do we know that? Marc?
2000 meters?

Caroline: The valley is about 700 meters and the mountains are about 2.500 – 2.600 meters.

Robert: 2.500 – 2.600. Ok.
What I really love about the landscape is that these are sea mountains.

These are rocks that – geologically speaking - came from the ocean and migrated during the ice age to some high plateau. I love that as an idea, and I love the idea that also birds migrated from the mountains to the sea, and the metaphor of birds migrating as a symbol for the migration of knowledge from the mountains to the sea….the idea of – you know- information in early times like Pagan cultures or Roman cultures being taken from court cities to rural mountain places.

The text is really about that. It says: „The Mountains must have imagined the City…“

I like the idea that the mountains are in a way almost archetyped in the shape of a city. And it is a funny thing, if you notice when we build cities like New York, we all do them in cliff shapes. I think that is for a reason. I think that we are sworn to mountain shapes as like instinctive areas of protection. And we kind of build our cities as echoes of the forms of mountains.

So it says:

THE MOUNTAINS MUST HAVE IMAGINED THE CITY
AND THEY DREW IT IN THE SKY FOR
US/ AND THE SEA BIRDS CARRIED MESSAGES
FROM THE WATER TO THE MOUNTAIN BIRDS
AS THE SEA ROCKS WALKED HERE SLOWLY

SEAROCK SONGLINES
Saalfelden Leogang

searock-songlines.com

This speech was originally published on searock-songlines.com on 23 April 2015. ArtRabbit re-published it with permission of Robert Montgomery and his team.

Robert Montgomery on the Map