Dark Shine

Two-part word and spatial sound installation, 48 Stunden Neukölln “Out of the dark”

Barely any air enters the former fermentation and storage cellars of the Berliner Kindl Brewery – daylight even less so. An abandoned, secluded place governed by emptiness and stale darkness. Down there, deep underground, where no phone signal reaches and calls go unheard, nobody stays for long. Visitors enter a pitch-black room. A hanging lamp emits blue light that barely lifts the gloom, weakly illuminating a barrier tape. A space like outer space, in which the individual indicator lights of amplifiers glow. Into this solitary darkness fall words, sentence fragments, single voices, cello sounds and ambient noise. Lost, yet strangely familiar – as if trying to convince us that a human being inhabits this place, that life is possible here. Text and sound, amplified by the long reverberation and the apparent endlessness of the dark, take on a heightened intensity of meaning.