The work, ‘passacaglia in c-minor’, breaks down variation forms
of baroque organ music into a multitude of grains, which in a se-
cond step are randomly arranged on a timeline using a genera-
tive process. The sound is played via loudspeakers mounted on
the inside of a glass display case. The surface thus serves as a
resonating body. The method of mechanically transmitting the
sound enables the audience to experience the sound ‘passar le
calle’ - ‘walking through the streets’. Visually, organ pipes and
graphic elements are at the centre of the installation as references
to allegorical representations of the Baroque period. In baroque
pictorial elements, the world often does not present itself as co-
herent and meaningful, but forces to reconstruct meaning from
fragments due to its fragile and incomplete form.
Based on this questioning, the images distorted by glitches (in this
case faulty image files), which are set in counterpoint to the organ
pieces dissolved in grains, come together to form a seemingly
illegible allegory. In Walter Benjamins ‘Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels’, the baroque allegory serves not as a mere aesthetic
form, but as a symptom of alienation and the awareness of crisis:
according to Benjamin, the allegory draws attention to the fact
that the world of baroque monarchy was increasingly in a state
of dissolution, and reveals how political power and the subject
are in a fragile and precarious existential situation, from which its
relationship to the present can be derived. The poetics of allegory
also seem to include the possibility of constantly placing things in
new and heterogeneous arrangements. ‘passacaglia in c-minor’
attempts to do this both formally and in terms of content, through
a new interconnection of different media, narrative structures and
their symbolic meanings