GESTURES OF HORIZON

In a landscape of sandpaper and folding rulers, the musicians of MAM.manufaktur use contemporary music to evoke memories as possible futures.

“GESTURES OF HORIZON” places the life and work of German mathematician, physicist, and researcher Maria Reiche (1903–1998)—who dedicated her life to the study and preservation of the Nazca Lines in Peru—at the center of a multi-layered sound installation.

Concept and Artistic Direction:

• Hang Su (composition)
• Nina DeLudemann (Scenography)
• Katja Cheraneva (movement coach)

In collaboration with MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik

• Paul Hübner
• Sabrina Ma
• Caleb Salgado

In this project, Hang Su (composition) and Nina DeLudemann (scenography), together with musicians from the Ensemble MAM.manufaktur for contemporary music, explore Maria Reich’s research methods and their resonance in the present:

Once upon a time, people engraved drawings into the desert floor; today, mountains of discarded textiles pile up there.

On stage, the performers use specially developed sound objects to create a landscape in which the audience is invited not only to imagine the vastness of the Peruvian desert but also to experience how closely it can resonate with their own lives.

486 meters of white folding rulers mark the difference in elevation between Berlin and Nazca.

The performers shape them into various formations that sometimes resemble the desert geoglyphs, and at other times the mountains of used clothing that industrialized nations now dump in South American deserts.

The costumes and blankets on which visitors can sit within the installation are also made from these recycled mountains of textiles.

Inspired by Maria Reiche’s boundary-transcending life journey, the installation blurs fixed categorizations of what is here and now, opening up possibilities to collectively observe what is absent and what has passed.

For GESTURES OF HORIZON, photographs, notes, and drawings from Reich’s estate were translated into sound, movement, and spatial structures.