The workshop, held at the Bärenzwinger, approaches ekphrasis – the written description of images – not as a literary genre, but as a method: a practice of translation between senses, media, and forms of attention. Taking Stevie Wonder’s The Secret Life of Plants as its starting point – a soundtrack created from written descriptions of a documentary film that Wonder himself had never seen in its entirety – we ask: What happens when one sense passes its information on to another? And what is inevitably lost, transformed, or reinvented in this process?
The workshop takes place as part of Nina Paszkowski’s exhibition Furore. The exhibition draws on the history of the Bärenzwinger as a site of spectacle, exploring the effects of public attention when fascination turns into unease and ultimately into rage. Paszkowski gives this rage a form through the Furies – the mythological avengers who, through an act of mercy, are transformed into the benevolent Eumenides. This transformation becomes materially visible as ceramic growths spread out from the walls of the enclosure.
In response, participants write and draw: about the silence held within the space, about the unheard duration of the bears’ lives, now interrupted by the Furies’ unresolved question of vengeance or mercy. The resulting fragments are brought together on a single scroll to form a collective score, which is performed together in the evening as a kind of orchestra. As part of a live radio broadcast via THF, voices resonate, making audible what the walls themselves could otherwise never say.
Free admission
www.bärenzwinger.berlin.de
Bärenzwinger Berlin,
Rungestraße 30, 10179 Berlin
Opening hours: Tue–Sun, 11am–7pm
www.baerenzwinger.berlin