MICHAELA MELIÁN
1956
Germany
SPEICHER* / MEMORY. 2008–2011. Sound and video installation, walldrawing and works (collage, ink, thread) on paper
The thematic and formal inspiration for the works in the installation Speicher is VariaVision—Unendliche Fahrt, a lost intermedia work on the subject of travel realized in 1965 by Alexander Kluge (texts), Edgar Reitz (films), and Josef Anton Riedl (music). A spatial installation with simultaneous screening and replay of films, multichannel music, and voice recordings, VariaVision offered new ways of perceiving music, film, and text.
Reitz and Kluge taught at the School of Design in Ulm. In the short period of its existence, from 1953–1968, the School exerted strong influence on German and international design, art, and media history. The School of Design was a private institution. It resumed the forcibly terminated tradition of the Bauhaus, defining the concepts of modernism, utopia, design, everyday culture, education, sciences, and early digital culture in the spirit of a democratic and aesthetic new start in Germany after 1945.
In 1963 the School of Design became home to one of the first electronic studios in W. Germany, the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music set up in Munich in 1959. The studio with its new, purely electronically produced sounds was successfully used by international composers and music producers. So Riedl produced the music for VariaVision in this studio. Today the studio for Electronic Music is housed at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.
For Speicher the studio in the Deutsches Museum Munich was brought back to life. Michaela Melián recorded the studio’s sounds, tones, and noises, and made them the basis of a new composition. Embedded in them, a polyvocal collage of texts on travel and movement is heard. There is no linear narration in Speicher, rather topics, stories, and time levels weave in and out of the present in sound loops and spirals. The camera moves slowly through one single winter night, flying over the front and back of a drawing produced by a sewing machine.
The spatial situation realized by Melián in Speicher draws on the conceptual design of VariaVision via projection, mural, voice, and music.
* The German noun “Speicher” covers a range of mutually related meanings: memory [computer terminology], storehouse, store, attic, reservoir.
