RELEASE EXPECTED: 2027

The Precipice was created in 2019 in collaboration with visual artist Marianne Hollenstein for a performance at Galerie Tsekh in Kyiv, Ukraine, presented in the context of a fashion show by Ukrainian fashion label Finch. It was also the first time that Marianne and I approached the work of Hannah Arendt together, an artistic dialogue that would later continue in The H Diaries.

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For the performance, Marianne created imaginary writing, improvising with handwriting on long strips of paper or fabric as if they were pages of an unknown text. Her work drew on Hannah Arendt, her legacy and her writings, and I responded to this visual process by giving it a musical dimension. At the same time, I wanted the music to exist independently from the performance. The result became a composition in its own right, incorporating quotations from Arendt, sometimes using her original voice and sometimes having her words spoken by a mechanised computer voice, alternating between her physical presence and a more disembodied experience of her words.

 

The piece remained untitled for many years, moving through my archive without finding a name. When I rediscovered it, I realised that it had been created at a particular historical moment that, in retrospect, feels like a precipice.

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We were in Kyiv in 2019, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic and before a full-scale war began to darken the sky of Ukraine and the horizon of Europe. At the time, none of us could know how profoundly the world was about to change. Since then, we have entered yet another transformation through the development of artificial intelligence. Looking back, 2019 feels like a moment at the edge of something we could not yet see.

 

We have already stepped beyond the edge of that precipice. What lies ahead can still be understood in two ways: with the hope that this transformation will lead to sweet rains of abundance, and with the fear that it could also lead somewhere much darker. But music neither smiles nor cries. It remains a distant observer, witnessing events and bottling up moments, preserving them for posterity.