round letters turn sounds (2018)

Four-channel sound installation (18 min.), photographic and fabric photocollages
Solo show at Kai Middendorff Galerie, Frankfurt (2018)

In this work, I was keen to explore ideas of translation from texts to sound and images, or even deciphering,
 and space—both in terms of a room and on a page. The anthology Lesebuch by the poet, writer, Hörspiel author
 and artist Franz Mon, with whom I had also been in close contact over years. In the book’s 
afterward, the writer Helmut Heißenbüttel makes use of the term ‘Neu-Entzifferns’, loosely translated as a form 
of ‘new deciphering’ of the act of reading. For me, the idea of sound in Mon’s writing seems never far away.
 The idea that one could be associating words with imagined sounds, fascinated me. In 2017, I was able to record Mon in his Frankfurter studio—his creaking office chair, occasional tapping (which seemed reminiscent of morse code), his typing, and how he typically tore paper up for his collages.

The book Lesebuch began to assume spatial dimensions for me—the page like an actual physical space. Seeing myself as a reader inhabiting or dwelling in these pages and their texts, I took photos of shadows of my head on the pages, then I cut the shadows out and placed them in the gaping holes where once the titles of the book contents page were.
A photograph of this collage, which was printed on fabric, was hung in the darkened installation space and facing a corner so it would not immediately distract from the sounds. The two small corner speakers only play the noisy sounds of Franz Mon tearing paper, while the two large speakers play more precise, composed sounds.