The Economy of Guilt (2010) | Audio-Installation
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the installation took shape with an unexpected encounter: a coincidental visit to a Lutheran church and the experience of listening to confession as something intensely personal, yet articulated within a shared ritual. This tension between the intimate voice and the collective form became the starting point for the work.
Made in collaboration with Adrian Sievering, the installation consists of a grid of sixteen loudspeakers. Each speaker carries a distinct voice, and each voice follows its own musical score. Together, the sixteen compositions gradually form a shifting, polyphonic field—a chorus that is at once collective and irreducibly individual.
The voices speak through a fictional litany, drawing on the language and cadence of confession. Fragments of a standardised text recur throughout the work, but never in quite the same way. At times the voices converge, producing moments of apparent unanimity; elsewhere they drift apart, overlap, interrupt one another, or dissolve into fragmentation. The individual voice repeatedly emerges from, and is absorbed back into, the collective.
The listener is consequently placed somewhere between congregation and witness. As the voices accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between personal admission and collective declaration, between genuine confession and ritualised repetition. Through bailouts, repetition, synchronisation, and gradual standardisation, the language of guilt becomes ritual. What begins as something intimate is transformed into a shared formula, repeated until its meaning starts to erode. Confession becomes chorus; individuality becomes collectivity; guilt becomes structure.
Rather than offering resolution, the work suspends the listener within this unresolved space – between culpability and absolution, individuality and anonymity, confession and complicity.
The voices speak through a fictional litany, drawing on the language and cadence of confession. Fragments of a standardised text recur throughout the work, but never in quite the same way. At times the voices converge, producing moments of apparent unanimity; elsewhere they drift apart, overlap, interrupt one another, or dissolve into fragmentation. The individual voice repeatedly emerges from, and is absorbed back into, the collective.
The listener is consequently placed somewhere between congregation and witness. As the voices accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between personal admission and collective declaration, between genuine confession and ritualised repetition. Through bailouts, repetition, synchronisation, and gradual standardisation, the language of guilt becomes ritual. What begins as something intimate is transformed into a shared formula, repeated until its meaning starts to erode. Confession becomes chorus; individuality becomes collectivity; guilt becomes structure.
Rather than offering resolution, the work suspends the listener within this unresolved space – between culpability and absolution, individuality and anonymity, confession and complicity.
Exhibitions
Klang im Namen des Raumes, Im Namen des Raumes, Berlin
18 July – 29 August 2010
Resonanzen – Festival für Hörkunst (Sound Festival), Tapetenwerk, Leipzig
15–18 April 2010
Rundgang HGB, Leipzig
18–21 February 2010
Made with the kind support of Nubert, Thomann, and In-Akustik.
[The video below is composed of short excerpts from the full 24-minute audio installation]
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