In the dark times will there also be singing?
Annual Exhibition Class of Julian Rosefeldt
01.- 02.08.2020
Deutsches Museum/ Blitz Music Club Munich
where you meander was once only wood and marsh (2020)
(showcase, fused glass, infusion bag, speaker, light, microphone 150 x 50 x 200 cm)
In the sculptural work Where you meander was once only wood and marsh (2020), a glass apothecary cabinet with sound components is staged as a quasi-subjective representation of absent bodies. It was conceived as a response to the physical, historical and social architecture of the exhibition space. While the pandemic, it has being presented at Blitz nightclub in the rooms of the Deutsches Museum and negotiates interdependent dynamics through sculptural, auditory and performative elements that influence the individual and social body.
From an infusion bottle placed in a glass box, a saline solution, like the one used to restore dehydrated bodies, drips through its hose into the bulges of the modified transparent cabinet floors. Every drop is supposedly picked up by a highly sensitive microphone, which is attached to a high stand, and played back through a loudspeaker. The particular sound is actually a recording, which creates a time delay that does not match reality and is intended to trigger cognitive and perceptual dissonances within the viewer.
Where you meander was once only wood and marsh (2020) is body and structure, carrier and content at the same time. The exhausted body emits an apparent heartbeat - a greatly reduced tone that is both bass and pulse - and is kept alive and revitalized by the liquid which runs through it. In the context of the night club, this work invites an argument, to a game with control and loss of control: Where the club as a social field of relative freedom changes the physical order in which experiments of collective and individual expression can take place, clubbing is increasingly commercialized and individualized and possibly even serves to satisfy subversive, subaltern potentials in order to subsequently reintegrate the body into the clutches of the performance society.
In the spirit of the pharma-pornographic era, in which Paul B. Preciado sees aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, the pornography industry and late capitalism for the reproductive and social regulation of bodies through microbiological design and embedded in global political, social and economic strategies.
Franziska Sophie Wildförster
