Saun Santipreecha: [0-I-RI-R]

The title is derived from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique (Prime, Inversion, Retrograde Inversion, Retrograde) and embodies the positions and permutations we assume in relation to one another, and to history. The anchor—Prime 0—in this case is myth and myth’s relation to systems of power as embodied in tonality, itself a system that has anchored myth for centuries. The installation is hinged between the visual and the aural, the fixed and the unfixed, and explores, among other things, sound as a medium that both goes beyond borders and yet erects bolder ones when systematized as music. Here, the familiarly tonal East German national anthem Auferstanden aus Ruinen, a stand-in for the many worldwide musical embodiments of myth, is deconstructed via the twelve-tone matrix and re-constructed in distorted fragments, through a trumpet solo performance. These recordings, played back through an old speaker horn mounted within the guardhouse, interweave this myth with recordings of historical witness accounts of experiences under systemic oppression, and yet what we always initially lean into is the more legible structuring of sound: music. These sounds are further distorted through a copper sheet placed in front of the speaker horn in which images selected from the museum’s historical archives are embedded and then unfixed via the physical hammering of the sheet itself. As in the work’s title, the entirety of the work is framed by the guardhouse, displaced through time and space yet still framing our present and our relation to myth and power.