“this is the land beyond my white blanched fears. sparse fallows, waste space, silence.“
ENTER. A blinding white hall. The ceiling: a glistening screen. The soil is fading in shifts of bright light, steps immediately become uncertain, tapping, tripping. A white cube. Antarctica. All of a sudden frazzles of texts appear: They pop up as projections before your very feet or eyes, in pieces of sound, stupendousely loud, then whispering, singular or looped, echoed, you step forward, you find them succssively, as if by chance, written on the bulges and ramps of this wide, white, seemingly empty, unpredictable land.
With her project proposal 90° 0' 0" S, Maren Kames plans to transform the visual and auditive density of her texts into a physically perceptible experience. In an arrangement of sound, projections and light, she wants to embed her texts in a spatial context, where they move like a body that is strechting and contracting, swelling and receding again. Exposed to this environment, the reader scans and explores the texts like an unknown landscape.
Maren Kames' texts work like fragile and open textures that are constructed out of different voices, tones and dynamics, marked by musical and cinematic structures like tempo, montage and cuts. As such, they tend to leave the planar paper dimension and wander into other forms, where sound and movement take on equal parts in the production of meaning. For her text HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU (HALF FOWL HALF SWALLOW), Maren Kames created a manuscript which translates both the space and movement on the semantic level into a textual, typographical arrangement. QR-Codes offer a parallel sound experience.
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Manuscript HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU[/caption]
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Follow the QR-Code[/caption]
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Follow the QR-Code[/caption]
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Manuscript HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU[/caption]
This focus on the tonal and spatial potential of the text, led to the idea for an installation in which all aspects of the text could become physically perceptible. The audio play against: blank is a preliminary realization of that idea, which is to be developed further in the proposed project 90° 0' 0" S. For against: blank, Maren Kames revisited central ideas from HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU to create another, new narrative. Then, she sketched and built a white cube, which absorbs outside influences and sensations to the greatest possible extent. In this reduced and intimate, blinding white space, the images, scenes and situations evoked by the texts have a powerful performative effect and become physically perceptible.
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Installation view against: blank[/caption]
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Installation view against: blank[/caption]
Maren Kames is a writer living in Berlin. Listen to Maren Kames audio play against: blank at poetenladen (Please note that the recording is in German. We suggest listening to the piece with headphones or external stereo speakers.)
English translation: Amanda DeMarco (90° 0' 0" S, HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU)
Photos: Maxie Fischer (HALB TAUBE HALB PFAU), Julia Tautz (against: blank)