Reconfiguration Chapter 1: schhhhhh
within a festival “48 Stunden Neukölln” , exhibition “This is not a fact”, curator Vitalii Shupliak, Galerie im Körnerpark , Berlin, Germany, 2025
performance, 15:00’
sound: sound composition, mixed with live drymba performance and spoken word
scenography: Tiffany and lead glass, mirrors & mirror glass, metal chain, poetry, UA wooden panels
text: poem, written and composed using schhh sounds in 3 languages
VIDEO
“Reconfiguration” explores how perception changes through distortion, noise and sensory overload. The performance combines installation, voice and sound to illuminate the instability of truth in a hyper-mediatised world.
At its centre is a growing visual structure made of window mirror and textured glass in Tiffany technique and charred wooden panels. The use of window glass brings an analogue material into dialogue with the language of the digital screen: a window becomes a screen, a frame becomes an interface, and the icon of a cross is placed alongside the familiar logic of the closing icon. The structure references the traditional iconography of Saint Sebastian, reinterpreting him as a figure of digital martyrdom — pierced not by arrows, but by information, exposure and sensory overload. The historical image becomes a way of thinking about a contemporary condition: the experience of being overwhelmed by the constant flow of digital information.
A text composition based on personal observations and the reading of news in three languages across different news platforms drives the performance. The text emerges from the experience of moving between different sources, languages, and versions of the same events. Words, often ending in “-tion”, are broken down and stretched into sound, while repeated “shhhh” sounds suggest interference, static and the noise of a signal trying to come through. Language becomes unstable: fragments are whispered, repeated, distorted and gradually dissolve into noise. The text moves between meaning and sound, between information and interference. The installation is activated through the performance and gradually takes on meaning through the artist’s presence, voice and actions. After the performance, the installation remains in the space, while the artist is absent. The audience can then approach the work differently, reading the text independently. This shift from presence to absence is an essential part of the work: the performance exists as a temporary act, while the installation remains as its trace, carrying the possibility of another, more private encounter.
4:46-5:23
Поки ви чекаєте
Поки говорите про ескалацію
Будуються нові міста повні маленьких хаток,
В яких живе смуток,
Houses with a silent foundation,
With no light
And the sun never comes to a place
where Schatten fließen leise
6:00-6:39
Що з нами буде
While you plan negotiations,
Breathing smoke,
Waiting in vain
We see simulation,
The fabrication of a global narrative,
Built on erasure, distortion, violation.
Що з нами буде?
In a city with small houses
where Schatten fließen leise
7:42 - 8:10
When the pain is transformed into data
Digitization of devastation.
Що з нами буде?
In times of expansion
Що з нами буде?
We have only expectations
Що з нами буде?
In a place where Schatten fließen leise
9:07 - 9:39
Де твої стріли?
No arrows, only lenses,
tracking the body with pixelated grief
He is in a deconstruction
Wie sind die Geräusche von Schwermut?
Arrows are ours now,
We don't see them in our bodies
9:33
Ми носимо їх тихо,
Посипаючи старі шрами попелом
9:54
Maybe we are just trying to open a window,
of pain in a distorted resolution,
Що з нами буде?
In a reality, where
There is a resurrection of the figurative,
where the object and substance have disappeared,
where....
10:18-10:22
Schatten fließen leise
photo: Vitalii Shupliak