14. 10. 2005 - 18. 01. 2006
denken wie der wald rauscht

stifter jahr 2005
 
o.k centrum für gegenwartskunst / linz (A)


Installation in three parts – an attempt to read a landscape



»I almost only read Stifter outdoors. On the banks of the wild, meandering Wondreb, on alder above water plants spread out like a woman’s hair by the currents. I sat on turrets, I read in watch towers. I read Stifter’s black letters on the now yellowed paper-white of the Tempel classics series in the shadow of pine trees, beeches and alder; I read in the grass, its green punctuated by the yellow of dandelions. In every spring filled with the light of thundershowers over boysenberry blossoms.« 
 (Werner Fritsch)


Denken wie der Wald rauscht” is the title Werner Fritsch has given to a text by Adalbert Stifter in which he evokes his childhood experiences in the Bohemian forest, experiences shared by Fritsch: “...the native closeness: Adalbert Stifter. The word Adalbert alone summoned (and still summons) in me the image of treetops gently swaying in the wind.”

Stifter's nature descriptions of the Bohemian forest are also the source of inspiration for the installation: “Denken wie der Wald rauscht” is a web made up of words, pictures and sounds, which unite the three exhibition rooms into a triptych. In the first room, slow, steady movement dominates: photographs of winter and ice in the Bohemian forest in various shades of white are structured by means of ‘colorful’ insertions – a bell pealing and graduated chords – thus lining up the images like pearls on a chain. In the dark third room, which forms the polar opposite of Room I, the river, a continuum, reigns: circling aerial photographs of the “meandering Wondreb” weave together over four projection surfaces to become a weblike, eternally repeating pattern, which is charged with energy by means of a deep, modulated underlying tone. The middle room, then, is the locus of meaning or language, crouching like a spider in the middle of a web made out of images and sounds. Here, Werner Fritsch reads aloud not only from the works of Adalbert Stifter, but also from his own book “Stechapfel,” which “would hardly have been conceivable without Stifter.”


in colaboration with: werner fritsch