NoTTB-c Notations of Touch Through Breathing (collectively)

Kunstraum FUGE, HOBNOB #4

2023

The artist’s work revolves around communication, breathing, empathy, body, space, sculpture, and drawing. The site-specific performance – which for her is never an end in itself, but always forms a dialogue with the surrounding space – is about non-verbal communication, collective bodies, and the modulation of space through breathing. Stella Geppert invites people to participate in the showcase, where they will only be visible through touch. The starting point of the work NoTTB-c or Notations of Touch Through Breathing (collectively) is the windows on the façade of the library, which can be opened and closed by a lever inside the shop window. Seen from the outside, the rhythmic opening and closing of the windows seem like a breath; the architecture breathes in – the architecture breathes out.

Stella Geppert transfers this act to the embodiment of draughts of air as she breathes and touches the guests and friends in the showcase space. Behind a screen stretched through the entire showcase space, the encounters take place that become visible on the other side in the gestures of touch. Those actions leave seismographic traces of charcoal on the curtain, which becomes a resonance carrier. The emerging movement sequences of the touches become independent drawings and embodied notations.

The HOBNOB exhibition series stands for the dialogical, experimental, and anarchic encounter space. Now, library visitors, people who happen to be passing by, or local residents are invited to take part in a drawing dialogue that moves between control and loss of control.