Russia / Germany - It all began with a documentary on the TV arts channel 'arte' about the world's coldest inhabited place, Oymyakon in the far east of Russia. The programme also mentioned 'ice whispering', a phenomenon that occurs when people breathe and speak in extremely low temperatures. The breath immediately freezes, generating a crackling noise that follows the speaker like a shadow.
Fascinated by the idea that words turn into crystals with a sound of their own, the artist Juergen Staack travelled to Yakutia in 2012, accompanied by his artist colleague Thomas Neumann. The sound recordings that Staack brought back with him were on display in the exhibition entitled SAKHA at the Konrad Fischer Galerie in Berlin. On his acoustic hunt to record the rare phenomenon of ice whispering - which the natives call "the whisper of the stars" - Juergen Staack took along an MKH 8060 RF condenser microphone from Sennheiser as part of his equipment.
With financial support from the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia, Staack and Neumann set off for Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), in January 2012. The minus 35°C that confronted them at the airport was just a foretaste of the temperatures awaiting them at their actual destination, Oymyakon. In 1926, a temperature of minus 71.2°C is said to have been measured there, qualifying the village for the title of 'Pole of Cold'. The first week was taken up with planning the onward journey.
"We had to wait until there were enough passengers to fill a minibus to Oymyakon," Juergen Staack recalls. "When the driver had finally got enough passengers together so that we could set off on the 24-hour trip, I must admit that we felt a bit queasy. What if the bus broke down in these temperatures...?"
The Kolyma Highway, the 'Road of Bones', took them around 700 kilometres in a north-easterly direction. The village of Oymyakon lies in a wind-protected valley that prevents the cold air from escaping, thus causing extremely low temperatures in winter. "During our first days there it was minus 48°C, which was - don't laugh - apparently too warm for ice whispering. It meant that we had to correct the temperature that had previously been considered necessary for ice whispering, 45°C, downwards. As we couldn't hear any noise, we started to get a bit nervous. Although there had been reports of ice whispering, no recordings actually existed. Was the whole thing perhaps just a myth?"
