1994
Border Bell
A Series of Projects of Cross Border Unification
While visiting a small village in the mountains I heard about a legend. The neighboring village which was in a different country was only a short distance away, but separated by high mountain range. It was said, though, that if you climbed a certain peak, you could actually hear the bells of both villages at the same time.
Sound signals have been used for simultaneous communication among the inhabitants of communities in both eastern and western civilizations, since antiquity. In Europe the church bell was in fact both the unifying and demarcating force of a community.
The bell not only announced church services, deaths, births, fire, revolt and festivals but it was such a strong unifying force that the limits of the community itself were defined by its range -- if you lived beyond where you could hear it, you lacked the daily information necessary to be a participant in society.
The story of the two villages began a train of thought. If one was to reverse the situation and put a source of sound at that listening point instead, of course it would be heard in both villages -- a sound each village would know was being heard by the other.
One could go further; the concept is broader. A periodic sound heard on both sides of any national or cultural division would unify the cross border communities, creating common moments during the day between peoples divided by a border.
Max Neuhaus 1994