Resin and marble dust, reflective PVC, transducer, mono amplifier, media player, cables, sound file, wooden plinth
4 min.
Sculpture: 49 × 30 × 32 cm, plinth: 90 × 50 × 40 cm
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
Untitled (Cleopatra) is a pseudo-ancient bust made of PVC, from which fragments of melodies and noises in the style of ASMR performances emerge. It was created for an exhibition studying the link between historical linguistic research in the field of tension between language acquisition and loss, current research on artificial intelligence and synthetic speaking – in a mutual short circuit.
The work is located in a larger context, in this case referring to a real collection. For the exhibition Every Word You Say (2014) at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, Wedemeyer took the history of the Deutsches Spracharchiv as his point of departure. He developed an acoustic tour that on the one hand referred to historical developments in language research and phonometry with the psychiatric and neurological work of the archive's founder Eberhard Zwirner and on the other explored the fundamental question of how the analysis of speaking goes beyond semantics, trying to capture emotions. The antique-looking head is placed on a pedestal, the mouth is covered with a round, reflecting plate. Is it to be silenced? We hear elements of a hummed melody and overly-present bodily sounds, as if under an acoustic magnifying glass. The simulated ASMR sounds remain beneath semantics, they are located where bodily reactions are generated instead of meaning. Perhaps they formulate acoustic resistance to the continuing infiltration of the unconscious by linguistic analysis and control.
The specific site references of Wedemeyer's artistic interventions are difficult to preserve when his works enter a collection. Kunstverein Braunschweig is located in a villa that formerly housed the Deutsches Spracharchiv; such local references can at best be transferred to the new framework of reference as metadata and linguistic contextualizations. By entering a collection, new, different references are created.
Volker Pantenburg
'In Untitled (Cleopatra), it was about the origins of language and in a certain way an origin-form of animation by way of breathing and other oral sounds.'
Clemens von Wedemeyer
A Brief Journey in Time. Clemens von Wedemeyer in Conversation with Marie-France Rafael, in: 'clemens von wedemeyer', Letizia Ragaglia, Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (Hgg.), from the collection 11, Vaduz 2023, p. 27.
