Villa Aurora Events Archive
December 2025
Villa Aurora X O-Town House Exhibition "Whispering Bells"
O-Town House
Info
In January of 2025, the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, allowing us to continue our work promoting intercultural exchange and fostering dialogue in arts and culture.
Located at the former home of Jewish-German writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta, Villa Aurora is dedicated to preserving the legacy of artists and intellectuals who found refuge from Nazi persecution in Los Angeles. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge. During the process of rebuilding, we are working with local partners to present our artists’ work within the city.
At O-Town House, Villa Aurora has found a temporary home away from home. A magical place located in the Granada Buildings, built in 1927 Spanish Revival Style echoing Villa Aurora’s architecture on the other side of Wilshire Boulevard. In addition to that we have found a kindred spirit and true inspiration in the founder and curator of O-Town House: Scott Cameron Weaver.
This group exhibition at O-Town House gallery is our kickoff anniversary show with works of artists spanning thirty years of our residency program. At the same time, it is the beginning of an annual exhibition series that will promote future fellows’ works in Los Angeles.
The exhibition Whispering Bells takes its name from the drought-tolerant flower species known as fire followers. The dry, bell-shaped flowers play a rustling song when caught in the wind. Its seeds are triggered by burnt material to start a new life cycle.
Whispering Bells offers a glimpse into the rich artistic legacy created by almost 500 resident artists since 1995 with works by Villa Aurora alumni Achim Mohné (2000), Klaus Pockrandt (2016), Sarah Szczesny (2021), Joram Schön (2024) and Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell (2024).
Together with O-Town House, this anniversary show celebrates old friends and new partners: international alliances showcasing our role as transatlantic bridge-builders and local connections anchoring our resident artists in Los Angeles.
Whispering Bells is curated by Friedel Schmoranzer and Scott Cameron Weaver. The exhibition is funded by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, with generous support from our long-standing partner, Saxony-Anhalt Arts Foundation.
About the Artists
Achim Mohné's interdisciplinary, media-artistic research into the extension of photography and its paradigmatic change through digitality is constantly evolving with new media and their apparatuses. In multimedia installations, sculptures, performances, sound and video works, interactive 3D visualizations with augmented reality or in VR game engines, as well as sculptural translations between digital and real space, works in public space and publications, he calls for a critical distance to the authenticity of the post-photographic image. His complex interventions address media-immanent issues of surveillance, manipulability, artificial intelligence, and virtuality, and examine our interaction with the world in terms of pressing social, technological, geopolitical, ecological, or cultural issues, with a particular focus on nature and environmentalism.
Klaus Pockrandt focusses on graphics, typography, exhibition and illustration as a freelance designer of visual communication, artist and teacher.
Co-founder and partner of the design studio atelier42 / visual communication furák, girod, pockrandt gbr
He holds a guest professorship for creative and artistic basics and drawing at the Department of Design Burg Giebichenstein art academy Halle.
Sarah Szczeny’s method of dissecting, distorting and separating images, such as cartoon film elements, characterizes her collage, painting and video work.
She examines the conditions of painting by stretching the medium’s boundaries through experimental interventions – for example by using gif and loop techniques as well as sound effects -, a multidimensionality is created that gives the painting character of movement and thus locates it in the tradition of cartoons. In this process of animation of collages, which is so essential for her work, Szczesny combines formal studies and citations of pop culture and art history.
Joram Schön, born and raised in Berlin-Moabit, is an artist and filmmaker. He studied fine arts at UdK Berlin in the class of Thomas Zipp. He has participated in several group, duo, and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad. In his drawings he combines nature and urban observations. He preserves urban change in his critical questions about topographies and architecture. He is currently doing his master's degree at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KMH), combining the mediums of drawing and filmmaking to realize autobiographical short stories.
Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell, born in New York, grew up in Berlin, and lives and works in Halle (Saale). She studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein and completed her bachelor's degree in 2021 with a focus on illustration in the class of Prof. Georg Barber. In 2023 she completed her diploma in textile art in the class of Prof. Caroline Achaintre. Fern processes her personal and digital reality in the form of tapestries. Here, the boundaries between good and evil become blurred, as well as the boundaries between self-medication and addiction, chaos and harmony. The dining table is a recurring element in her works.
Visit + Location
O-TOWN HOUSE
672 S. Lafayette Park Place, Suite 44 / 43
Los Angeles, CA 90057
T: +1 213 263 9428
home@o-townhouse.art
Hours:
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 12 - 6 pm and by appointment
Please contact us if you would like to come by at another time!
Street parking available and at Wii Spa with car wash included.
Access to the building at the gate by using the call-box to call O-Town House from its menu (Dial: 044). Take the stairs immediately to the left.
The gallery is accessible by elevator. If you need assistance please let us know.
Villa Aurora X Lookout FM Radio - Episode 12 of "if the house could speak"
Radio LOOKOUT FM
In January of 2025 the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, and with it the radio transmitter that broadcasts from there throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and the beaches below.
This series explores the voices, past and present, that reverberate at Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger’s former home. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge.
During the process of rebuilding and awaiting our artists’ return, we will be broadcasting newly produced, archival and historical footage for you to listen to and maybe wonder: Is this really only a house or, like Carl Jung suggests, can the composition of a room induce the realization of new truths?
Each episode of if the house could speak will be broadcast on a loop for 24 hours with no interruption starting at 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. For our listeners across the world, that corresponds to 7 PM Coordinated Universal Time and 9 PM Middle European Time.
Episode 12
And then you hear your heartbeat
Recorded at Los Leones Canyon, Villa Aurora premises and surroundings, August / September 2024
This piece is conceived through field recordings from the Villa Aurora premises - the garden, the courtyard, the salon - the greater surroundings of it, and moments in which I connect directly to the soundscapes through voicing, playing the violin, the in-house organ, and small bells and objects. The spine of the entire work is an actual walk through the Los Leones Canyon: a loop from Villa Aurora, through the canyon, the beachfront, and back to it at the end. This used to be the daily route of Marta Feuchtwanger, and as a passionate hiker finding deep artistic inspiration in nature, I was inspired by the idea of making this piece. Along the walk I recorded short descriptions and thoughts passing through my mind, and composed the full piece by weaving these spoken fragments with the surrounding sounds, the instrumental and field recordings, and the shifting atmosphere of moving through these various mental spaces and landscapes. The work unfolds as a poetic essay of a time spent in connection to a place with personal meaning to me. In the 90s, I first came to Los Angeles for a period of three years as a student at USC. Building upon this relationship from my youth happens through memory, attention and conscious communication with a constant reality - one in which I am a passer-by. It is a document of this one time.
A lot of the work on this radio piece is done on the go, while walking, traveling, flying. The authentic sounds remain without additional post-production, besides minimal balance changes and duration adjustments. The walk took place on September 19th 2024, from 8:01 in the morning. These notes were taken on August 20th 2025, while listening to the full one and a half hour long sound file of the walk for the first time, in the air on a flight from Lombok to Jakarta. This piece is deeply personal and meaningful to me, and I thank LOOKOUT.FM and Villa Aurora Los Angeles for the commission for their broadcast “If the House Could Speak.”
Biliana Voutchkova
Biliana Voutchkova: composition, organ, violin, voice, field recordings, objects
Recording assistance for Villa Aurora courtyard recordings: Sam Rowell
Quiet presence: Laura Stellacci Mixed by Biliana Voutchkova
Mastered by Sam Rowell
Part 2
Like A Giant Instrument
This is a recording of Biliana Voutchkova’s site specific live performance at the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Sunday, September 8th, 2024.
An aural ritual commemorating recent deaths of human and nonhuman beings, inviting the listeners to a state of raised attentiveness towards personal and imaginary habitats.
Biliana Voutchkova: composition, violin, voice, field recordings, bells
Co-produced by Villa Aurora and The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
About LOOKOUT FM
LOOKOUT FM is a West Coast terrestrial radio home for the broadcast of "transmission art:" experimental audio composition, modern serials, data sonification, radio plays, multi-day compositions, and radio-centric performances. Their licensed stations in Burbank, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades function as FM exhibition spaces where radio art is presented without regard to constraints of time, structure, or commercial consideration.
