Reconfiguration Chapter 1: schhhhhh
within a festival “48 Stunden Neukölln” , exhibition “This is not a fact”, curator Vitalii Shupliak, Galerie im Körnerpark , Berlin, Germany, 2025
performance, 15:00’
sound: sound composition, mixed with live drymba performance and spoken word
scenography: Tiffany and lead glass, mirrors & mirror glass, metal chain, poetry, UA wooden panels
text: poem, written and composed using schhh sounds in 3 languages
'Reconfiguration' is a performative and sonic exploration of fractured perception and the search for resonance in distortion. The performance combines installation, voice and sound to illuminate the instability of truth in a hyper-mediatised world.
At the centre is a growing visual structure made of lead glass and charred wooden panels. The artist reinterprets St Sebastian as a symbol of digital martyrdom, pierced by overexposure and sensory overload. His body is continuously reconfigured, reflecting the fragility of identity in the age of simulation.
A text composition of personal observations and associative language drives the performance. Words, often ending in ‘-tion’ and ‘-schhhh’, act as sonic ghosts: whispering, mechanical, ambiguous. They imitate radio interference and create the feeling of listening through interference. Fragments are spoken, whispered, disturbed and dissolved into noise.
Sound here is structural, not illustrative. The subtle interplay of whispers, field recordings and filtered radio creates an auditory field of unstable meaning.
How do we find truth in whispers?
Based on Jean Baudrillard, ‘Reconfiguration’ resists clarity. It is a delicate counter-gesture: an attempt to collect fragments, to feel resonance in the broken and to reassemble presence in the absence of linear meaning.
The work invites the audience into a present moment of active perception in which memory is reconfigured in tension with sound, silence and light.
4:46-5:23
Поки ви чекаєте
Поки говорите про ескалацію
Будуються нові міста повні маленьких хаток,
В яких живе смуток,
Houses with a silent foundation,
With no light
And the sun never comes to a place
where Schatten fließen leise
6:00-6:39
Що з нами буде
While you plan negotiations,
Breathing smoke,
Waiting in vain
We see simulation,
The fabrication of a global narrative,
Built on erasure, distortion, violation.
Що з нами буде?
In a city with small houses
where Schatten fließen leise
7:42 - 8:10
When the pain is transformed into data
Digitization of devastation.
Що з нами буде?
In times of expansion
Що з нами буде?
We have only expectations
Що з нами буде?
In a place where Schatten fließen leise
9:07 - 9:39
Де твої стріли?
No arrows, only lenses,
tracking the body with pixelated grief
He is in a deconstruction
Wie sind die Geräusche von Schwermut?
Arrows are ours now,
We don't see them in our bodies
9:33
Ми носимо їх тихо,
Посипаючи старі шрами попелом
9:54
Maybe we are just trying to open a window,
of pain in a distorted resolution,
Що з нами буде?
In a reality, where
There is a resurrection of the figurative,
where the object and substance have disappeared,
where....
10:18-10:22
Schatten fließen leise
photo: Vitalii Shupliak