2025

The first impact is the sound of machinery, slightly tamed by the big earmuffs you were instructed to wear. You hear the ceaseless hum of a shredder, a bell spinning occasionally, the noise spreading and twirling in the room. It’s not an unfamiliar sight. It could be the noise of any engine room, any machinery – any place that makes up for the normality of overproduction the world depends on. It’s almost like a mantra: cold, close, and yet afar.  How tolerable are the places that make up for normality? And where does tolerance end? 

One of the sounds comes from Shredder3XL (2025), where two star rollers spin toward each other in the center of an almost 4-meter-tall LED wall. Designed for tillage, a functional element of bounty, the rollers point at a self-devouring plane, claiming the central space of a huge apparatus where one would expect an image to erupt. There is no image beneath the sound, nevertheless - nothing beyond the frame failing to fulfill its original purpose, two displaced material supports. Yet everything is calm and steady.

The bronze bell spinning at times in Glocke (2025) complements the soundscape. Dating back to the 1950s or 60s, it was originally produced by the Association of Returnees, Prisoners of War and Missing Persons of Germany (VdH), whose aim was to reintegrate returnees into a democratic society after World War II. Moreover, it has the words "WIR MAHNEN” (we mourn, or we admonish, or we remind) inscribed in it - a signature move of VdH, which has erected over 1,800 memorials in the Federal Republic of Germany -, in this way underlining its function as a tool meant to foster collective unity. 

Historically, bells have been a pivotal element in the constitution of public space. Rung to announce both the ordinary and the unusual, they have functioned throughout the centuries as an effective way of governing communities through sound. For this reason, they stand as a good example of how public space is constructed by a series of techniques that determine, produce, and disseminate power in the form of rules. In this case, that functionality also sheds light on how productivity operates as a socially binding element, as the prisoners were “reintegrated” into society through labor. Productivity in itself seems to be a rule, too.  

The sound you are being protected from should not be forgotten, however, as the aggression it embodies points in the opposite direction, towards detachment. This is an itinerary recurrently outlined by Jonas Roßmeißl, whose twisting, dissective approach to sculpture-making often refunctions fully operational objects towards uselessness, although they never reach the realm of unfamiliarity. It’s almost like a metonymic move, a material analysis -- as the loss of functionality highlights how the value of an object is determined by its capacity to fulfill a specific function, that function becomes visible as part of a broader structure of codes and values. Power becomes exposed when it fails. 

Endmaß (2025) is a great example, as it is composed of a series of steel gauge blocks sized according to standard lengths, normally used for calibration of measuring equipment. As the material expression of precision, these blocks stand as an instance of universality, a form of general, global understanding. Here, however, they form one single body, thus pointing towards the possibility of reclaiming a form of organic measure, placing the body as a standard, rather than an abstract numeric value. In doing so, they stress the array of ambiguous forms the notion of ‘technique’ may operate in – an interpretation of nature, a blend of theoretical and practical knowledge, but especially a set of principles of rules that direct standards in a given context. Precision is, above all, an application of a standardized power. 

Another good example of how a specific material can be an instance of this dynamic is the series of five drawings (2025) in Amatl, upon which Roßmeißl lasered title blocks, subsequently drawing a grid. Each drawing is titled after a specific scale, complicating the idea of a fixed dimension. There is 1:1 (2025), for instance, but also 1:4.92 × 10^26 (2025), which refers to how the distance of 1.22986869 × 1026 meters - the equivalent of 13 billion light-years (the farthest visible reach of space that has ever been achieved by mankind) - can be displayed on the 25 cm x 25 cm, which is the size of the grid Roßmießl drew by hand on each sheet.

The oldest sample dating back to 75 AD, Amatl is a type of paper made from the inner bark of wild fig trees, developed in the pre-Hispanic period of Mexico, where it served primarily as a communication medium throughout Maya civilization (2000 BC - 1697 AD) and to a large extent for the Aztec Empire (1300 - 1521). The organic nature of the paper places it almost as a sort of dynamic measure, effectively in tension with the series of precision standards Roßmeißl populated it with. Moreover, the fact that Amatl was banned under Spanish colonial rule stresses how materiality and technique shift with governing apparatuses, and how the latter determine the set of rules - where one writes and how for example - according to which power is exercised. 

Inasmuch as it is always an instance of a model and that it determines the set of material rules one lives by, technique may be seen as a script of hegemony. This is an old story. Roughly 2400 years ago, in Plato’s “Gorgias” (380 BC), Gorgias, a celebrated speaker, argued for the importance of seizing the right moment in rhetoric. In his view, effectiveness lies in the capacity to understand ‘καιρος’ (‘kairos’), a word that stands for ‘due measure’ but also for ‘opportunity’ in Ancient Greek — an adequate sense of fitting, whereby the right moment to act effectively is seized. Situational appropriateness, to put it more simply. As Gorgias frames it, it’s all about being convinced (not necessarily about truth, as Socrates points out in the same dialogue). 

This is a discussion on a material level, and one that still holds in contemporaneity, even if the world might be a very different place today. For even if capitalism has turned any prospect of profitability into pure opportunity - almost generating a ‘kairos’ of its own -, there is still a material world functioning as a buffer zone, the facticity of which often makes its way to the surface through failure. Trauriges Windrad (2025), a filigree sculpture cast in stainless steel, embodies one of those moments. Modeled after a picture of a wind turbine with broken blades in the aftermath of a hurricane, the work places a symbol of technological advancement in the realm of fragility, as the fiberglass resembles mashed paper -- failed, withered, and ridiculed. 

Technique and vulnerability do not exclude each other. Quite the contrary, as Faust (2024) shows. The gesture is simple: a fist based on a digital mold data set from Russia - acquired through a cash transaction to bypass sanctions to the country, then compressed and sent via email -, whose production was almost fully automated, from casting to polishing, holds a fiber optic submarine cable that can transmit up to 612TB per minute (the entire data traffic of Europe), bent in the exact curvature that would make it stop working. 

The ensemble, however, is one of disruption and absence, where the material promise of power and the digital promise of freedom simultaneously fail and conjoin. On the one hand, the fist taking hold of the cable is the product of a nearly anonymous, industrial chain of events. On the other hand, the cable gives in to a realm of vulnerability. In the end, failure still is a criterion of truth. Truth is not about opportunity, I bet Roßmeißl would say.  

written for ‘Herdenmanagement’