Cycle of Performances

7:00 – 7:45 DESCENDING NOTES with Won Pak
8:15 – 9:00 LIMP with Matto Zoppi

Conceived as an extension of If There Is Tension, the Public Programme is co-curated by Zita Leutgeb and Silvia Russo, unfolding in close dialogue with the exhibition’s spatial and conceptual framework. Bringing together sound, movement, and poetry, the programme expands the exhibition’s investigation of tension, focusing on the voice as a medium: its presence, absence, suppression, fear, and emotional weight. It approaches the voice as a physical and political condition, shaped by pressure and resistance.

For Berlin based artist Won Park’s performance DESCENDING NOTES, the artist’s personal memories become spoken words and gestures, repeated three times as they descend through the levels of the space, arriving differently each time. On the ground floor, they move as photons, physical light, measured and exact. On the staircase, viewers close their eyes; a light moves across their phosphenes, and the story continues inside a darkness no one else can see. Underground, memories return as phosphine, the flame that seeps from a body already decomposed, a will-o’-the-wisp, light returning from what has vanished.

Sound and voice performer Matto Zoppi presents LIMP. A body moves through the space, microphones and cables extend outward, tracing lines of force that bind, pull, and transmit, threading through the room and through the people in it. The apparatus and the performer remain mutually dependent: a system of constraint and release that implicates whoever it reaches. LIMP investigates the physical and relational dimension of sound production: what a body generates when it strains toward relation – with objects, spaces, and presences that surround it, and what those forces do in return. The space becomes a field of thresholds: between gesture and sound, between what is captured and what escapes, between proximity and withdrawal.

Won Park (b. 1998, Seoul) is a Berlin-based artist whose practice returns to one question: how does a history you didn’t witness still reach you, and where does it come to rest in the body? This has taken shape through video installation, photosensitive prints of archival footage, and site-specific performance. She recently completed her Master’s degree in Art and Media at the Universität der Künste Berlin, and has shown work at Silent Green, Nadan, Flutgraben, New Fears and others.

Matto Zoppi (b. 1995, Italy) is a sound-voice performer based in Berlin. His practice brings together sound, poetry and performance to evoke grotesque and liminal tensions. Using the voice as a central instrument, he incorporates elements of electronic music, theatre and radio art to investigate the boundaries between speech, transformation and control. He has performed at the Venice Biennale, Julia Stoschek Foundation, OHM Club and Errant Sound Berlin, among others. His debut solo work, Dedalo, was published by Fango Radio Editions in 2023.

Photo Credits
Paride Ambrogi, Won Park