Fort Biennale 01. In the body of language

The Bowels of the Earth is part of a series of large-scale
paintings depicting subterranean landscapes between
abstraction and figuration. An organic pictorial space
permeated by roots invites us to adopt the perspective
of the ecosystem beneath the earth. The sewer pipe
refers to the pragmatically radical interventions of humans
and undermines the psychology of our dualistic
view of nature. On a pole next to it hangs the sculpture
whisper sweet nothings like an anthropomorphic leaf
telling tales from the forest.

melanie bonajo’s video Night Soil–Economy of Love
is part of a trilogy of experimental documentary films
(2014–2016) that explore the history of Western peoples’
detachment from nature and their attempts to overcome
it. The first film Fake Paradise delves into the significance
of plants and hallucinogens, while Nocturnal
Gardening centres around women who have found alternative
ways of living in harmony with nature.
In the video shown here, the protagonists find the
words to describe their physical and psychological experiences
as sex workers in a self- confident manner. In
contrast to the common perception of sex work, their
stories are about emancipation, pleasure and healing.
Here, sexuality becomes a means to transcendence, inspired
by Sumerian traditions of sacred prostitution, a
historical predecessor of “care work” for and with people.

Egon Rusina says of himself that he is a woman in the
body of a man with the soul of an animal. In his series
Pisciadoi, the artist from Ortisei, in Val Gardena, focuses
on a Ladin pun, offering his own interpretation. Pisciadoi
means waterfall, but its literal translation would be “two
who pee” or “peeing in pairs.” Drawing on personal
memories in this series, the landscape, the body, mist
and water become one in the artist’s imagination in an
eco-sexual way. “Everything runs, flows, splashes and
rains into my feelings!” The pleasure of the woman peeing
in the open gives Rusina the cue to reflect on natural
divinities, apparitions, and the lands of desire.

On the sand floor of the Fortress, Masatoshi Noguchi’s
From a Galaxy To Another Galaxy draws new connections
between astronomical constellations, zodiac signs,
and cultural mythologies by means of unexpected translations
into everyday objects. On the other hand, Eureka,
a dustpan with a handle holding a globe, pays homage
to the workers who metaphorically carry the weight of
the world on their shoulders like Atlas. The works reveal
short circuits and connections between forms of nature,
human culture and linguistic perception, taking us on a
dreamlike journey to discover the interstices between different
cultural levels of meaning.

A human body, whose gender refuses to be clearly legible,
confronts in the video a punching bag. This body
exhausts itself until the fight ends and they leave.
Expressed primarily through metal, concrete and rubber
sculptures, Toni Schmale’s artistic language has something
tangible, solid and vigorous. It moves the gaze onto a
wide field of desire—
beyond physical optimization or practices
of sexual pleasure satisfaction. The way bodies are
controlled and standardised in society, and references to
loopholes to escape its categories: Schmale’s works leave
traces in many directions. Ultimately, the simultaneously
open and closed nature of these works allows the viewers
to experience being left to their own interpretations.

Nannucci’s works transcend the boundaries of representation
by using language to create mental images
evoked by words. In the process of visualisation, they
show a continuous suspension of the semiological and
semantic components of reality. With What to say what
not to say, the artist manifests the act of speaking and
the act of silence as equal counterparts. Here, silence
is rather freed from any negative rhetoric—through
language Nannucci draws attention to the ever-shifting
nature of our perception. The work underlines the
individual responsibility inherent in the use of language,
offering a space for reflection on the power of words
and the importance of adopting a conscious approach
to communication.

In her work Shut Up, Actually Talk, that was presented for
the first time at documenta 13, Chiara Fumai impersonates
fairground performer Zalumma Agra and has her
speak in feminist tongues. Zalumma Agra was impersonating
a carcassian woman, a beauty ideal of the time
that was even traded through slavery, in the Theatre of
Curiosities at Barnaum’s American Museum in New York
in the 19th Century. In Fumai’s work, this performer, who
was forced into silence, is becoming the mouthpiece for
a feminist manifesto.
“Who says ideology is also my adventure? / Adventure
and ideology are incompatible / I am my own adventure”.
In the role of Zalumma Agra, Fumai quotes Io dico
io. Secondo Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile (I say I. The
Second Manifesto of the Feminist Revolt, 1977) by theorist
Carla Lonzi and the group she co-founded Rivolta
Femminile. As a medium communicating between times,
the artist manages to negotiate language and speaker
as political issues.

In Sylvie Fleury’s neon work Naughty But Nice, the artist
appropriates an expression used to describe a superficial
kind of appeal. Two seemingly contradictory
traits embody a confident attitude in the form of a large
glowing red lettering. Sylvie Fleury became known in
the 1990s for her glamour, fashion style, and lifestyle.
Combining art and consumerism in such an uninhibited
way seemed disreputable, even though the introduction
of profanity and consumerism into art forms
has a long tradition dating back to Marcel Duchamp
and Pop Art. The artist consistently combines this approach
with an ironic and humorous deconstruction
of traditional clichés related to gender. She employs
a language analogous to lifestyle brands. Strikingly,
the logo itself becomes an object of desire, confronting
us with a role reversal in the affirmation of gender
stereotypes.

In New York 1+2 / Chicago, the artist has assembled
Playmobil castle modules into a series of tall towers.
Beyond the scale of a child’s playroom, the works reference
New York and Chicago skyscrapers, cities where
the artist has lived during art residencies. The sculptures
can also be read as the materialisation of an inner
space in which memories are stored. They also refer to
the densification of cities and the legend of the Tower of
Babel, and find formal continuity with the labyrinthine
architecture of the fortress.

CodeVerse is a video and sound installation developed
by Alexandra Cárdenas specifically for Fort Biennale 01,
that stages a live coding session in the exhibition space.
As we listen to the artist’s recorded composition, we can
see her in the act of writing the projected code. The programming
language appears as a notation of the music
while simultaneously functioning as a visual element
that engages in an aesthetic dialogue with the texture
of the fortress’ stone walls. The work makes us perceive
the “simultaneity” of the interaction between the human
input and its algorithmic processing. Cárdenas offers
an insight into a personal creative process of musical
improvisation in programming language, and in the way
the partial unpredictability of digital processing also
contributes to it. By offering a glimpse into this act of
creation, the artist wishes to share her enthusiasm for
the potential, open ethos, and freedom inherent to the
practice of live coding.

With Sincope/Synkope (first published by Einaudi in
2018; German translation: Folio, 2021), Roberta Dapunt
presents a volume of poems that, like her entire oeuvre,
approaches the “body of language” in a multitude of
ways. The poet explores the places of her own body, in
the same way she explores the places of her language.
These places are inseparable, mutually informing each
other, existing in constant relation to one another. As
a body, artist, woman, lover, mourner, in constant dialogue
with others, Dapunt’s vision of herself is curious
and rigorous, and transposes the pain and dissonance
of the human condition onto paper. Finitude, love, loneliness,
visions, futility, language: everything is a source
of turmoil. The German translations of the poems bear
the signatures of the two translators.

Il motivo ricorrente dei grandi obiettivi delle macchine
fotografiche nelle opere di Beatrice Marchi ironizza sul
dominio della fotografia e della tecnologia, e racconta
di come la presenza degli obiettivi determini la nostra
percezione della propria immagine. Gli apparecchi fotografici
diventano personaggi di una narrazione integrata
da elementi fantastici. I corpi si confondono con lo
sfondo, si rifugiano nella natura e a loro volta ne usano
la bellezza come accessorio decorativo. L’anima guarda
attraverso un occhio nero – in un sistema di caverne
ampiamente ramificato in cui cerchiamo rifugio, ma che
possiamo ottenere solo con «Schufa und Anmeldung»
(sistemi di credito e registrazione tedeschi).

Days is an experimental feature- length film whose structure
is based on an episode of a melodramatic soap
opera. Through the stories that define the lifestyles of socalled
chosen families common amongst marginalized
queer communities in most urban areas, the film presents
various illusive forms of labor these fragile lives are
built upon. The different accents and levels of English and
the specific utterances on typical topics spoken among
those New Berliners paint a contemporary portrait of a
specific linguistic embodiment.

Inflatable kinetic sculptures made from fabric mimic
bodies in the act of performing repetitive gymnastics.
In a postmodern take on Henry Moore, the textile sculptures
are allover- printed with photographic representations
of stone and copper surfaces. The work takes
a satirical stand on contemporary labour policies, in
which concepts such as freedom and flexibility are often
presented as advantages while keeping workers in
precarious and vulnerable positions. The inflatable figures
are connected to a power source and a timer that
dictates their expressive dance of physical exercises.
The sculptures are iconic representations of the extras
in the fitness universe of Days.

For the audio installation 100 001, Hannes Hoelzl was
inspired by a viral YouTube video from 2017, in which
the popular YouTuber Mr. Beast is filmed counting from
one to one hundred thousand. A person mechanically
counts, conferring a linguistic body to the numbers. For
this sound installation, Hoelzl programmed the voices
to speak the most used languages in South Tyrol, to
pronounce continuously increasing numbers over the
entire duration of the exhibition. Augmenting every day,
they buzz through the exterior of the fortress as words
and, reflected by the stone and the walls, are reflected
in numerous echoes. The technological translation of
the number system into voices creates a rhythmic mantra,
while the timbres of the different languages turn into
musical expression.

The group of works A Family is installed on the outside
walls of the fortress and consists of large-format wooden
letters forming the names of the artist’s closest family
members. The work manifests family relationships in
the format of simple signs in public space, and offers the
chance to reflect upon social conventions and personal
freedom. As façade lettering, the unconventional family
structure becomes concrete poetry.

A group of musical instruments invites visitors to explore
their sounds, and to enter in dialogue with other people.
Each instrument was built by Max Castlunger from found
furniture, second- hand and natural materials, inspired by
instruments in his collection from different corners of the
world. Through this work, he aims to show that music can
be a universal language accessible to everyone—in his
native Ladino, “Lingaz universal.” At the same time, he is
interested in making the mechanism and logic of these instruments
understandable; they are tuned according to a
pentatonic scale in order to encourage harmonious interactions
both with each other and with external instruments.

Experimenting with natural dyeing techniques, Altınstark
integrate their own personal ties and stories into fashion
collections and textile works. Words, characters
and marks are printed on fabrics or clothes through
wax- resist dyeing. Their work is also influenced by graffiti
and the idea of replicating signs. The work on display
illustrates how interconnected and—quite literally—intertwined
their relation is: Özlem Altın invites her sister
Esra, who then invites Mari, to participate in a joint exhibition,
and to react to both the space and Özlem’s work
Naked Eye (lateral masking). The Altınstark’s eye (“göz”)
with two peace signs closes the circle of this dialogue.

In her paintings, collages, photographs and artist’s books,
Özlem Altın explores the body at rest and the inanimate
in motion. In her work, Altın draws on the collection of
photographs that she has assembled over the years,
combing found photography with her own images to
create dense visual constellations. By drafting connections
between layers of photomontage and paint, the artist
calls the viewers to acknowledge what is happening
in between the images and develop their own narratives.
Some elements and motifs—like the mask, the mermaid,
and the heron—are recurrent symbols she employs to
embody something half human and half animal, and a
state of in- betweenness. Her complex web of images
contributes to the elaboration of a narrative, at times
mythological, on bodily existence.

Sunny Pfalzer’s textile installation Rub your face onto your
shoulder recounts stories about togetherness, vandalism
and romance. The pastel-coloured t-shirts, trousers
and blouses that make up the installation were worn by
six performers on the street and now invite the visitors to
linger. The installation is accompanied by a sound piece
in collaboration with R’n’B musician Marshall Vincent. It
is a meditation, a poem, a body activation, and an invitation
to rest in the installation and to be embraced by
the soft textiles. Sunny’s methodology builds on embodied
and representational elements of protest and the
possibility of transforming “togetherness” into a tool for
empowerment. Through performance, video and textile
sculpture, they investigate the strength and perils of anonymity,
collective bodies and identity, and how we can
embody sensitive ways of relating to our surroundings.

In Egon Rusina’s archive of artworks, thousands of meticulously
created drawings are filed in folders, in extensive
series dedicated to specific themes inspired by natural
phenomena. Rusina records his ideas by hand; most of
his works were created outdoors, on the Raschötzer Alm,
where he lived in a barren hut for a long time and still often
goes up there today. Der Baum (The Tree) is one such
series, in which Rusina interweaves vegetal elements,
such as the tree and its branches, with the inside of the
human body, nerves and blood vessels merging in an
ever-changing flow. In this series, too, delicately sexual
forms make their way onto the surfaces of the structures.
Interior and exterior landscapes overlap; flesh and spirit,
imagination and reality become one. Here, the artist reminds
us of the similarities between the many elements
that make up life on earth.

Julia Frank’s series Forest of Temperament is a journey
into the complexity of the human character, a navigation
through the verdant depths of our inner landscape.
The artist evokes transformation through reconstruction
and resilience. She works with a fusion of traditional and
new visual techniques: black and white photographs are
transferred onto a layer of wax on cotton fabric, through
the processual use of heat as a transfer medium. Images
are burnt into the material through the targeted application
of heat. Each individual work is based on a pair of images
selected from Frank’s photographic archive, which
serve as a cooperative structural element. The mixture
of figurative and abstraction reflects human nature in the
interplay between body and language, public and private,
and the inevitable constant change of our identity.

French-Vietnamese choreographer and dancer Thierry
Thieû Niang has worked with the elderly on a number
of projects. The documentary film Une jeune fille de 90
follows Thieû Niang’s workshop with Alzheimer’s patients
in a hospital in Ivry-sur-Seine, with whom he explores
music and simple dance exercises. The camera
establishes an intimate yet unobtrusive intimacy with
the fragile women and men, who flourish under Niang’s
guidance, at times demonstrating unexpected enthusiasm.
Blanche, Adélaïde, Pierrot and other participants
are immersed in the memories of their lives as they recount
them. Thieû Niang dances with the elderly, often
in pairs and in close physical contact, though some of
them are physically weak. This film testifies the emotive
power of dance and touch as languages of connection
and healing, and challenges misconceptions about
Alzheimer’s disease. (Source: filmdienst.de)

“What resonates from the walls of the fortress? Human
and non-human voices, and emissions from the ultrato
the infra-sonic. In their multiplicity, as a swarm, geometrical
figures, synchronicity. In their quietness, barely
perceivable, intimate.” (C. Profanter)
At the core of Caroline Profanter’s acousmatic sound
objects is the pursuit of abstraction, the liberation of the
material from its origin. The disembodied voice, timbre,
grain, texture and its spectrum are the source material
of this work. The sound is played through a series of
multi-channel loudspeakers, modulated in time, positioned
in such a way as to dialogue with the space and
its reflections; the room becomes a resonating cavity.
Every material, and every body, transforms the sound
waves as they travel through space. Air and stone are
made to vibrate, oscillating between friction and symbiosis,
harmony and dissonance, resistance and fusion,
immersion and observation.

The site-specific sculpture My Summer Time dialogues
with the sundial on the façade of the fortress, which
shows an incorrect time due to daylight savings time
change. With a playful installation of a ladder for gathering
apples, the artist creates a utopian scene that suggests
a possible resetting of time.

The video Lip Sync is one of the artist’s earliest works, created
during a period in which he employed his own body
as his primary material, and like fellow artists of his time,
Nauman explored the new possibilities of audiovisual and
time-based media and their effect on his own perception
and that of the viewer. Rotated 180 degrees, the video depicts
the artist’s mouth as he attempts to synchronise
the movements of his lips with an audio recording of his
voice, in which he repeats the title of the work while simultaneously
listening to it through headphones. The synchronised
movement of image and sound sets the viewer
in a nervous tension that rhythmically escalates into a
dance-like interaction of the physical and the mental between
the artist, the recipient, and the medium. The word
“sync” has a close phonetic relationship to the word “think.”

Since the late 1980s, Emin has been known for the raw
confessional intimacy of her work, which challenges the
relationship between subjectivity and creativity, social
norms and the art market’s expectations. She takes autobiographical
content as her starting point and illustrates
it with various media: from installations, such as
her bed and a tent embroidered with the names of her
lovers with sleeping partners, to neon, prints, drawings,
and paintings. In her self- representation she deals with
her own physicality, including her sexual history, her
experiences of sexual violence and abortion. What are
you so fucking afraid of? asks Tracey Emin in 2001, in a
swearing punk style on the diptych. Art is her cathartic
mouthpiece she uses to directly communicate with herself
and the viewer.

Alighiero Boetti’s tapestry is part of a series of works created
by the artist in collaboration with Afghan artisans. In
this work, 625 squares filled with colorful letters from the
Latin alphabet give life to a composition that alternates between
textual legibility and visual imagination. In doing so,
the artist refers to post- war concrete poetry, in which language
was not only used as a system of signifiers, but also
as a synaesthetic material and toolkit for visual spaces of
possibility. Through a playful approach to existing systems
such as geometry, letters and colors, authorship becomes
secondary and allows the magic of serendipity to occur
through collaboration and cultural overlaps. This is where
Boetti allows the principles of Eastern art, which fascinated
him in Afghanistan, to flow into his art. As the artist once
affirmed: “Give time to time and give the world to the world.”

For over 25 years, Berty Skuber maintained an intense epistolary
friendship with neurologist and art therapist Wulf
Becker-Glauch. Her husband Henry Martin and Wulf’s wife
Hedwig Schockmann also participated in their exchange
of letters. Skuber’s letters were as elaborately designed
as they were casually natural, and included many signs
of her artistic production, which in turn were interpreted
and explained by Wulf Becker-Glauch through his own art
therapy approach. While the correspondence would visually
appear as a model for the Mail Art movement, its true
peculiarity lies in the depth with which the protagonists simultaneously
reflect on their artistic process through correspondence
and its intensifying effect on their perception
of time and life. “The heart is always already open to the
word through artistic creation.” (Wulf Becker-Glauch, from
the correspondence with Berty Skuber, 12.09.2006)

Welponer’s artistic work seeks out new relationships between
all that is beyond the human, exploring anthropomorphic
openings, transitions, and landscapes, until the
line between human and non-human is blurred. This approach
is also found in her work Stillleben mit Muschel
(1975), made after a trip to the Seychelle Islands.

Inspired by naturalist studies and the anthropomorphic
scar formations on trees, Karin Welponer created the
series Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit (but all pleasure seeks
eternity) which is named after Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra song. In variations ranging from the symbolically
figurative to synesthetically abstract, the artist
explores a study of the vulva in charcoal sketches on
handmade paper. As a homage to femininity and lust,
she creates forms that become signs of an evocative
natural language.

Roni Horn works on a minimalist reduction of the form
of the artwork in favour of words and materials. Without
needing visual representation, her sculptures evoke
mental images in a sort of pre-visual dimension. In the
sculpture Seen in the distance, we read “her eyes were
as hard as two old mountain ranges seen in the distance,”
materialised as black plastic cast precisely into a
negative form made of aluminium. The sentence appears
like a fragment of a larger narrative, connecting
vision as an act that shapes meaning and the morphological
composition of the mountain landscape. In the
work, Horn reflects on the way our environment can influence
our perception and language, as well as the relationship
between place and identity.

The drawing Riveste il pozzo di Pavor approaches the
canvas as a space for thought. The surprisingly small
drawings, in their comic- like form, are arranged across
the paper in loose groupings, with arrows between the
drawings and fragments of sentences occasionally suggesting
the direction in which they might be read. Within
Baruchello’s “minimal visibility” (Tommaso Trini) single
elements are repeated and vary, for example in their
proportions to one other, creating an image- specific intertextuality.
They do not have a didactic function, but
are repositories of narrative energy (Lyotard, 1982). By
drawing on the abundance of verbal and visual rules,
the artwork is a playful mapping of a thinking process.

Carlfriedrich Claus attempts to expose the latency of
language, experimenting with the idea that something
akin to “structural information” might emanate from the
carriers of linguistic signs, or rather from the “substance”
of their sounds. When working on his “language sheets”
or “vibration texts,” he articulates simultaneously a work
that is multi- layered and aims to broaden the perception
of those who perceive it. “After completing a language
sheet I often ask myself: what is the extent of that which
has not yet manifested itself in the body, which without
simultaneous realisation, thus surpassing consciousness,
manifests itself through the movement of the hand;
what is the extent of that which is not yet conscious in
consciousness—especially in linguistic consciousness
[…].” (CC in a letter to Ernst Bloch, July 8, 1974).

Jörg Zemmler’s installation offers an insight into the reality
of a writer’s literary production. It depicts the phases
his texts go through until they make their way into a
book: from the first handwritten sentences jotted down
in a notebook to the digital copy, where the draft is negotiated
and discussed in the editorial office, and ultimately
makes its way into a printed publication. We learn
about the author’s craft, which here is actually a job of
shaping and sculpting the body text, and has little to do
with the idea of a lone figure at a desk. In this context,
Zemmler also speaks of “language disputes,” meaning
that printed language can be preceded by discussions,
edits, corrections, and compromises with publishers.
Copy Editors of Jörg Zemmler’s texts: Merle Rüdisser
for the publishers Limbus and Alphabeta, and Ralph
Klever for Klever Verlag.

The work Den Materiellen Netzen waechst stets auch ein
analoges Gedankennetzwerk, neuronales Netzwerk zu–
die moderne Struktur seines Metadenkbildes (Material
networks are always accompanied by an an analog net
of thought, a neuronal network – the modern structure of
its own image of metadata) was created at a time when
communication systems have become noticeably globalized
and personalized. In the text, Kowanz describes
the effects of technological changes on our consciousness
and imagines how these may lead to the development
of a global neural network. At the same time, she
outlines how the structural organisation of such networks
can itself have an impact on content. Kowanz thus
foresees the impact of the psychological and physical effects
generated by communication technologies, which
we are clearly experiencing today.

Lawrence Weiner created two versions of his artwork
Das Tor ist eng Bozen / Stretta è la porta Bolzano (The
Bolzano Door Is Narrow) in an edition of 25 pieces each.
Bolzano, the gateway to the South and to the North, according
to the perspective. Who can enter? Who can
find a place here? This silk embroidery with its alternating
bilingual inscriptions could be read as a critical commentary
on the politics of the city of Bolzano.
Weiner has created several text installations in outdoor
spaces in South Tyrol, such as the installation on
the façade of Meran’s city hospital. When designing the
text sculptures, the artist started with his first language,
English, and then translated them in the respective local
languages. The poetic lettering, alluding to literature,
remains open to interpretation while simultaneously allowing
us to engage with the particular site it is meant for.

The interactive installation #SOPHYGRAY invites the visitors
to communicate with a chatbot developed by artist
Nadja Verena Marcin. At the same time, we watch the
artist dance as a gynoid (female humanoid robot) and
dancer in a two-channel video projection reminiscent of
Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This long-term project,
involving 40 collaborators, examines AI- driven chatbots
from an intersectional feminist perspective. Informed by
theorists such as Audre Lorde and Donna Haraway, for
example, #SOPHYGRAY consciously breaks with the expectation
of submissive service apps such as Alexa or
Siri. Through a combination of philosophical, humorous
and absurd language, #SOPHYGRAY draws attention to
stereotypes of language, gender, culture and behavior in
consumer technologies.

Close (Roots and Branches) e Close (Step) were made
for the forest in Buchen, North Tyrol. The steel structures
represent gateways into a painterly world with
references to the wilderness in both content and form.
The decorations of Tyrolean Stuben inspired the ornaments
on top of the frames which were made from
objects found in the area. They give the paintings a totem-
like quality with additional references to animals
and the seasons. The shape of the canvas is reminiscent
of a smartphone; scratches on the display merge
into roots. In its ambiguity, the title Close refers to the
ambivalent relationship of modern man to (their) nature.
The effects of the weather, which can already be seen
on the painted surface, become part of a process of appropriation
of nature that will continue at the Fortress.