ARTISTS’ INTERVENTIONS @ Networks of Cooperation: Nick Acorne & ANTUUM, Periphery of Language

The performance is built around a single gesture: tracing the moment at which words cease to function as language and begin to exist as sound. It emerges from Nick Acorne & ANTUUM‘s own experiences of encountering situations in which language is no longer sufficient to articulate lived reality. Rather than rejecting language, the work follows its gradual transformation into another form of expression.

Bringing together Ukrainian curators, artists and European institutions working with Ukraine, the “Networks of Cooperation” ​conference generates a dense field of speech that becomes the raw material of the composition.

The opening section presents two analytical perspectives simultaneously. On one hand, words unfold in sequence, ordered from the most frequently spoken during the conference to the rarest, revealing the statistical structure of the discourse. On the other, their sonic characteristics become an autonomous musical material.

From this point onward, the performers begin constructing a multichannel sonic environment through which these words travel. The space continuously transforms through a reciprocal feedback process in which each performer's processed output becomes the other's input. As the process unfolds, both the words and their meanings gradually dissolve into musical textures. Speech loses its communicative function and reappears as resonance, rhythm and timbre, eventually dispersing into clouds of sound distributed throughout the architecture of Kunsthaus Graz.

The lighting follows the same trajectory as the sound. At first, it reveals and defines the architectural features of the space. Gradually, it ceases to illuminate objects directly and instead transforms them into shifting shadows and fragments. Just as language slowly loses its descriptive function, light progressively abandons representation, becoming an autonomous spatial material that reshapes the perception of the unfinished exhibition and the architecture itself.