Stefan Roigk: TRACES—OF | sound installation at ausland / 04.-08.09.2019

Stefan Roigks current work TRACES—OF is inspired by the investigatory crime and detective series: The sound installation transforms ausland into an intermedia investigative scenario, in which not a real event is traced back, but rather the images and associations that our imagination links to abstract sound. Starting point is an acousmatic composition created from recordings of everyday sound and room atmospheres. In a first step, Roigk plays the piece to volunteer witnesses: In individual interviews, they explicitly describe the possible goings-on they’re associating with the composition, as if it were an acoustic piece of evidence.

Roigk follows these fictive re-narrations and rephrases them for TRACES—OF into different media of forensics, joining sound, objects, photographies and drawings into a coherent composition and spatial arrangement. Adopting classic methods of crime scene documentation by artistic means, he reconstructs and filters sound material, compounds replicas, involves photos of crime scene details and possible sound sources as well as sculptural models and graphic scores of motion sequences and effluxion of time. On pinboards, possible nexuses and acoustic relations are depicted.

The exhibition visitors can move freely within the narrative atmosphere of this intermedia scenery, interpreting the materials like the investigators on TV do. TRACES—OF gives rise to a subjective dramaturgy for a music piece disassembled into fragments and presented as a puzzle all over the room.
As live special on saturday night, Stefan Roigk and Lausanne-based electronics musician Francisco Meirino play concerts based on the sound material used in the installation, and with his mind tricks, conjurer and psychologist Fabian L. involves the guests in a group interrogation on the exhibition.

Stefan Roigk (*1974) is a fine artist living in Berlin. He deals with the borders of abstract sound collages, sculptures, installations, performance and graphical scores. His artistic focus is to direct fragments of everyday life into dynamic intermedia arrangements, which he creates with an exceptionally visual language as a transformatory principle for his concept of sound and music. He is using the compositional and deconstructivist principles of musique conrète, assemblage, sculpture, visual music and industrial design to develop compositions, which are presented as stage-like installations with narrative impressions.

Francisco Meirino (*1975) lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland. His music explores the tension between programmable material and the potential for its failure, he is primarily interested in the idea of recording what is not supposed to be : gear failures, the death of PA systems, magnetic fields and electro-static noises and in how he can use them and hear them radically out of context. He mainly works with the computer, (eurorack) modular synthesizer, reel-to-reel tape recorders, magnetic fields detectors, piezo tranducers, field recorders and various home-made electronics.