Francesco Marzano / Artists documentation
Type: digital photography & video
Germany, Cologne
2025

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Pneuma - Wärmezeitmaschine

Pneuma - Wärmezeitmaschine is an immersive, participatory performance that places breath at its centre - as a primal force of life, a collective bond, and a political symbol. The performer inhabits a resonating space in which his breath is acoustically amplified. Visitors are invited to become part of this sonic fabric through their own breathing. In this way, a living interplay of sounds, rhythms, resonances and bodies emerges - an acoustic sculpture, a breathing collective. Pneuma means both "breath" and "soul" in Greek. The performance reflects on breath as a carrier of identity, a communicative potential, and a mirror of the macrocosm. Breath is as essential to our life as it is fragile - it can be hindered or suppressed, as demonstrated by pandemics or methods of violence and oppression. Inspired by Joseph Beuys' participatory art concepts and his energy plan as well as by the breathing practices of the Marina Abramović Method, the project sees itself as an artistic-social experiment, a sensual and political invitation to attend to breath as a "primordial sound", the most reduced form of togetherness, and the most elemental form of relating to the world.

Guidance of the curators Antje-Britt Mählmann and from the Marina Abramović Institute, Billy Zhao and Serge Le Borgne, the exhibition takes place at Museum Schloss Moyland.

Emergency Solos

Text: Francesco Marzano

In 1975 the artist Christina Kubisch conceived and performed for the first time the Emergency Solos, a series of pieces in which she reflected through her body and her instrument – the flute, which is used both musically and “sculpturally” – on topics such as personal and artistic liberation from the conventions, her role as a (female) artist in the (male-dominated) cultural enterprise, expectations and strict categorisations of the society – from which she proposed a kind of emergency exit, starting with these solos.

Exactly 50 years later I reenacted, with her permission, most of her pieces and put them side by side with new Emergency Solos conceived by me.

A lot has changed in the society and in the cultural life since then, but some battles and struggles are always actual and relevant.

The Emergency Solos are pieces about identity torn between personal vocation and social impositions, about limits in communication, about the abuse of power by institutions that still decide what is art and who is allowed to do it, about the paradox between the intimacy of the relationship with one’s instrument and the unavoidable public dimension of art.

They mix autobiographical elements and episodes (curiosity, depression, passion, imagination, self-doubt, addiction, failure, ambition, the love-hate relationship with my instrument, …), oscillate between slapstick and ancestral images, gentleness and disturbance, and challenge the limits of body, instrument and breath – understood in the sense of the Latin spiritus, both as breath and as soul. They are a quest for an authentical voice, for alternative paths and narrations, for sounds, images, connections, extremes.