All three works are related to one moment, a moment of not touching the ground.

In one diorama box this moment is approached as movement, a Choreographie, and in the other box as sound, a Partitur.

 

The weaving is a pattern, inspired by the representations of measurements of Étienne-Jules Marey of animal movements (in his book La machine animale, 1873). It is the pace of a horse, going from walking to galloping, until the brief moment it does no longer touch the ground. The Partitur is written in a script, based on a very early musical notation, called Hufnagelschrift. It is written ‘in campo aperto’, without staff lines. The writing parallels the movement of the horse that is woven, from walking to galloping, now concentrated on the sound of legs touching the ground until the moment the horse is momentarily suspended in the air.

 

The little ceramic dish is inscribed with a fragment in ‘steno-schrift’, a type of shorthand created by a Dutchman named A.W. Groote, in 1899. He needed a form of writing he could easily make notes in; he was serving a general at that time and had to make notes while riding a horse - that is how the fluid forms of his shorthand came about. This script thus has a very physical and functional origin.

The work was made for a specific space, two diorama boxes (70 by 70 cm) part of a group exhibition in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, organised by Das System, May-August 2014.