String player (2025)
April 29, 2025 XX Y X, echoraum, Sechshauser Straße 66, 1150 Vienna
Presentation of a work by Marta Beauchamp, PhD candidate at Interface Cultures.
The work started on the day I found miniature models of balancing sculptures, which I produced for a sound installation in 2017, while searching for something else. Back then I exhibited them as resting bodies, self-sufficiently hovering in a small space of balance surrounded by a large space within which to fall into. Statue-like they could not perform motion; the richness of possible positions that their joints could move to was not exhibited, but rather frozen in sketches preserved in my notebooks.
I returned to these sketches and reproduced one of the models as a large-scale prototype, using thin and long paper tubes that a shop on Meidlinger Hauptstraße kept aside for me for pickup at 1pm on a cold winter day, and string. To bring colour to the tubes I wrapped them with thin orange and green polyester thread, closing off the ends with tape. The prototype was designed so that I could play cello inside it or with it: cello playing as an action to move the object, the dynamics of the object defining a new way of cello-playing.
XX Y X is a series of contemporary open formats and forms of presentation in the fields of performance, the visual arts and sound art, curated and organised by Michaela Schwentner since 2019.
