The Last Question

Viewers enter a dark, custom-built room with benches on either side. In the centre is a metal structure with wooden boxes that can be opened and closed, allowing the sound from the small speakers inside to be modulated. The instrument is balanced on a metal rod that stands on a circular concrete base. On top, there is a mechanism that ensures a candle that remains upright regardless of the orientation of the instrument. The artist operates the doors of the boxes, changing the volume and resonance of tones and looped instrumental phrases. Viewers are free to enter and leave the performance space at any time.

The musical passages have been inspired by Johannes Kepler’s early 1600s Harmonices Mundi, a theoretical proposition that claims the cosmos corresponds with certain musical tonalities, as well as the voice of the artist’s mother, harmonised so that only the overtones in her speech are heard. The work takes its title from The Last Question, a short story by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Auditions for an Unwritten Opera / 2023

Zilberman, Berlin / 2023

Built in collaboration with Bart Callebaut

Photo: Chroma

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