Speicher, 2008
Still from video and sound installation, 53 min
Speicher, 2008
Still from video and sound installation, 53 min
Speicher, 2008
Still from video and sound installation, 53 min
© Michaela Melián / VG Bildkunst
Speicher, 2008
Sound and video installation, 53 min
Installation View, Cubitt Gallery, London
Photo: Cubitt Gallery, London
Speicher, 2008
Sound and video installation, 53 min
Installation View, Cubitt Gallery, London
Photo: Cubitt Gallery, London
The thematic and formal point of departure for SPEICHER is Varia Vision – Endless Journey, an intermedia work realized in 1965, but missing today, by Alexander Kluge (texts), Edgar Reitz (films) and Josef Anton Riedl (music) on the theme of travelling. Reitz and Kluge taught at the Academy of Design in Ulm, where one of the first electronic studios in West Germany was located beginning in 1963.
For SPEICHER Michaela Melián makes this studio resonate once again. The sounds, tones and noises are recorded and form the basis for a new composition. A polyphonic text collage embedded in it sounds out the theme of traveling and music. There is no linear narrative in SPEICHER, but themes, stories and layers of time are interwoven in sounding loops and spirals with the here and now.
The installation SPEICHER is complemented by a large format mural, works on paper and by RÜCKSPIEGEL, a five-part video installation, for which Melián interviewed the protagonists affiliated at the time with the production of VariaVision. In the interview passages, rendered by actors, there is a reflection on the meanwhile obsolete connection between artistic modernism, technological euphoria and society-changing motivations.