Percussion of two Rooms

Exploration of invisible, hollow areas under the plaster of walls and floors and their graphic processing as percussive auditory events. By making many of the found spots simultaneously audible in this process, the space transforms into an unusual structure, into a sculptural form of hearing, into a time-relatedness of the moment.

For his exhibition "Percussion of two rooms" Ulrich Eller examines the two rooms of the Giannozzo Gallery in their quality as sound material and as sound bodies.

The walls and the floor of the room were tapped- sites for sounds with a different height and timbre. Sheets of drawing paper were attached to these spots- fields for strokes of different thickness and length. With a pencil of black grease crayon, Ulrich Eller worked on the walls and the floor and created drawings and sound sequences on the papers. The rhythms resulted from an empathy with the found sounds; the gestures of the drawing correspond to them.

The drawings remain in the places of their creation; the sound sequences also remain there. They were recorded on tape and played back simultaneously via cassette recorders attached to the appropriate spots. The sounds of specific locations- in the room, a self-sounding space. Through the percussion, the space opens up to perception. Its musical quality becomes visible through the drawings and audible through sound recordings.

Rolf Langebartels (original in german)

• Galerie Giannozzo, Berlin 1983

Sheets of paper; grease chalk; 8-channel composition; electronical equipment