Live-Interventions & five sculptures

https://youtu.be/0XqDrKwi90Y

“In the work Touch Gloves (and a Farewell), Carla Vollmers explores the field of tension between body, space, movement and object, while focusing on a performative approach. This entanglement of media can be experienced concretely when performers interweave the work with actual corporeality through occasional performative interventions. Even in the absence of the performers, prints visualize physicality by picturing an upper body in four fragments: shoulder, upper and lower arms, which are ultimately completed by three images of interlaced hands arranged above each other. The transfer prints on hardened textile, which are attached to wooden arches and the wall with yarn, form the sculptural work. Their placement suggests an embrace extending through blank spaces in the room. These blank spaces invite the viewer to add their imagination to the work and thus actively participate in the completion of the gesture.

The materiality, consisting of a specific technique of transfer prints and the layering of nettle fabrics with paste and varnish, deepens the symbolic meaning of the work. A visual interplay with perception in space unfolds: the closer you get to the sculptures, the more blurred they appear and the interplay of the fragments within the embrace become vague. The opposite quality emerges as soon as you move away from the objects.

Within the work, in a sense, both space and objects are trying to become a body. Through form and gesture, more complex contexts open up, which constantly question closeness and distance, presence and absence, as well as interrelations. At the same time, a problem unfolds: that of corporeality, which seems to be inseparably interwoven with projection, imagination and objectification.” (Text Vivien Blessing)

In Touch Gloves and a Farewell, I was particularly interested in exploring processes of memory and how they are intertwined with relationships. The work centers on the gesture of an embrace, but this gesture is purposefully deconstructed and layered. Simple, minimalist choreographic sequences reveal fragmented movements, while the spatial placement of performing bodies disrupts direct contact, often partially obscured by architectural elements. From certain perspectives, fleeting moments of touch and encounter seem to materialize—illusions that dissolve when viewed from another angle.

This deliberate use of empty space between moving bodies invites the viewer’s imagination to fill it with the anticipation of touch, drawing attention to the connection of memory and projection. It also questions how physical presence can blur with subjective perception, intertwining corporeality with projection and objectification. The work explores if there is a form of latent violence or unresolved tension, something romantic or dreamy in this processes.

The space of expectation becomes active, embodying the potential of what might follow—whether intimacy, absence, or something else entirely. My interventions engage this charged expectation, subtly playing with possibilities while embracing the ambiguity that remains.

Performers: Josefine Luka Simonsen, Leonie Stöckle, Zahra Ghadimian, Carla Vollmers