OUTandDOORS is a 45-minute site-specific audiowalk by HELLA LUX, which the audience experiences via headphones. Guided by an uncertain narrator, the audience will move through the city while listening to a global choir of voices.

In OUTandDOORS, the audience explores places from all over the world while walking down familiar streets. They will learn about different rules and borders that urban spaces comes with, the visible and invisible lines that lead their paths through a space that first might have appeared open and borderless to some of them.

These experiences merge into the international realm of a digital voice that can travel space and time. After a while, fiction and reality intertwine and the audience loses their sense of direction. Did you just hear a bicycle where there was none? Are you sinking deeper into the digital space that connects us all? What kind of glances do you feel on you skin as you walk down the street?

The audiowalk OUTandDOORS reduces the outdoors to a concept, an essence that is reused and reshaped into an immersive playground. Rules are questioned and a powerful mixture of international perspectives and ideas broaden the experience of this all to known public space. OUTandDOORS follows fundamental questions about borders, movement, the public and the individual HELLA LUX reduces big concepts into core ideas only to recreate and reorganize them into a reflected, more open and transparent public space for the audience to experience.

To create the OUTandDOORS, HELLA LUX worked with young creatives from 9 cities across the world – Chiba, Reading, Warsaw, Moscow, Düsseldorf, Chongqing, Chemnitz, Haifa and Palermo. The jointly produced audiowalk explores public space(s) and guides its listeners through their city while secretly observing strangers from a distance, recognizing patterns and experiencing joy in the little moments while diving deeper into the concept of the outdoors. Moreover, images of the city are recreated as the experiences of different public realms merge into this audio piece.

Above that, HELLA LUX collaborated with sound designer Rupert Jaud, who has produced a 360° binaural listening experience for OUTandDOORS. Up and down, near and far as well as across the whole globe – all these dimensions are layered upon the surrounding world by spatial soundscapes. The sounds of the audiowalk melt into the sounds of the city and create an Auditive Augmented Reality that lets the walking listeners get immersed by the cosmos, HELLA LUX has created.

The audiowalk OUTandDOORS was produced while most public in the world were locked down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Outside movements were highly restricted. Due to reduced in person contact, the public space of the world wide web became even more important and for a global group of young creatives it became clear that one does not have to travel far to gain new perspectives. HELLA LUX is pleased to provide an audio experience that can recreate one’s idea about public space with perspectives from all over the world.

The premiere of OUTandDOORS in Düsseldorf was hosted by FFT Düsseldorf, Germany. The premiere of OUTandDOORS in Chemnitz, Germany, was hosted by Klub Solitaer e.V. Now, the site-specific OUTandDOORS audiowalk in Chemnitz and Düsseldorf are free of charge and freely accessible via the app storydive.

Artistic Directors Lenja Busch and Milena Wichert
Sound design Rupert Jaud
Project Assistance Judith Hesselmann
Voice Petya Alabozova
Outside Eye Liljan Halfen
Producer Valerie Witt
Translation Robin Gilham

With the voices of young people from Reading, Warsaw, Moscow, Palermo, Chiba, Chongqing, Haifa, Chemnitz and Düsseldorf.

Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Gouvernment Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as the Farmont Foundation.