PERFORMATIVE INSTALLATION: GESTURES OF HORIZON
Dates
Free admission – drop in anytime during opening hours.
5 August | 17:00–20:52
6 August | 05:35–20:48
Concept & Artistic Direction
Hang Su (Composition)
Nina DeLudemann (Scenography)
Katja Cheraneva (Movement Coach)
With
MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik
Paul Hübner
Sabrina Ma
Caleb Salgado
GESTURES OF HORIZON places the life and work of the German mathematician, physicist, and researcher Maria Reiche (1903–1998), who devoted her life to the study and preservation of the Nazca Lines in Peru, at the centre of a multi-layered sound installation.
Composer Hang Su and scenographer Nina DeLudemann, together with the musicians of MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik, explore Maria Reiche’s methods of research and their resonance in the present. Where people once engraved drawings into the desert floor, mountains of discarded textiles now accumulate. GESTURES OF HORIZON invites visitors to shift perspectives and reconsider the far-reaching consequences of their own actions.
On a stage made of sandpaper, the performers create an immersive landscape using specially developed sound objects. The audience is invited to imagine the vastness of the Peruvian desert while experiencing how closely it connects to their own lives. 486 metres of white folding rulers mark the difference in elevation between Berlin and Nazca. Throughout the performance, these rulers are transformed into changing structures that evoke both the ancient desert geoglyphs and the mountains of discarded clothing that industrialised countries now leave in South American deserts. The costumes and blankets on which visitors are invited to sit are also made from textiles recycled from these waste mountains.
Inspired by Maria Reiche’s boundary-crossing life and work, the installation blurs fixed notions of what belongs to the here and now, opening up possibilities for collectively observing what is absent and what has passed. For GESTURES OF HORIZON, photographs, notes, and drawings from Reiche’s archive have been translated into sound, movement, and spatial structures.
At the same time, the production draws attention to contemporary global interconnections. The question of how landscapes are shaped by human activity links Maria Reiche’s observations with the realities of the Nazca Desert today.
More information and programme updates:
https://www.manufaktur-aktuelle-musik.de/projects/gestures-of-horizon