Can you recognise the melody of a-historicity? 

Ella Littwitz and Benjamin Verhoeven artistic researches make us look at the institutionalised forms, embedded in ‘real’ as a point of meeting between axes of time and space, from very unexpected perspectives. They enter the peculiar realm of paradoxes, which are avoided by the convention. The sound of void, composed of the same universal particles as the physical matter, in their artistic researches becomes material: a vacuum that obtains a body itself.

Verhoeven, with craftsman’s attention, looks at the nature of montage as a thing in itself, takes what is considered to be a strategy in an individualised form. Montage becomes a material object, which the artist scrupulously studies in his cinematic lab. In the process of scanning the video, he establishes a conversation between the machines on the non-functional grounds of aesthetics and in this dialogue the capture of invisible fragments becomes possible. Verhoeven experiments with materialisation in video from inanimate objects of knowledge. In his project “Sculptural Movement” he opens another dimension of dynamism in the still imagery of a classical sculpture park. He creates dynamic movement out of a book and manages to break from the gravity of history and symbology of the objects and breathes into them independent, aesthetic and ahistorical melody. They seem to graciously dance in the omnipresent muteness of the waltz that is impossible to hear.

In her project 'What there is / What is there?’, Littwitz materialised the ephemeral spirit of archaeological artefacts and disrupted the perception of memory as solidified matter. For a period of time she was working with historians in Tempelhof airport in Berlin, where the evidence of the complex history of the space is scattered. The site has been used at different times as a military centre, a concentration camp as well as a logistical hub. Re-appropriations of the highly symbolic eagle sculpture on the top of one of the airport’s buildings, that used to be adjusted and cosmetically modified by the changing administrations of Tempelhof, strongly highlights the universality of the power narrative despite specific, seemingly different ideologies. In the spirit of Critical theory, Littwitz reveals the flesh of politics as a carnavalesque game of masks and signs where the winner takes a temporary lead in defining the new ‘real’ of the constantly dynamic history. By scanning the mundane objects as witnesses of time, she liberates the invisible power of their memory. She presents 34 three-dimensional prints of the artefacts, including a broken piece of a vinyl record and an enlarged scan of the only negative found in the digs with emulsion remains on it. This assemblage contains potentiality of disrupting seemingly apparent.

Sound can fill the space without being present in it. Music as an orchestrated harmony not only immaterially embodies the space, but enriches it with a character. While skillfully playing different mediums as instruments, Littwitz and Verhoeven projects appear symphonic, as if they it was on the same musical staff.

Original version of the text for de Bijloke & HISK