2016, Stathis Gourgouris, South Magazin - documenta 14
Article (en)

Mask Silence, Silence Masks, or A Condition of Utmost Listening

"One of the greatest works of the German ­composer, performer, dramaturg, and sound-­installation artist Heiner Goebbels is undoubtedly Stifters Dinge (Stifterʼs Things, 2007). It is difficult to describe this “look on contemporary creation” simply as a composition or installation...." ... "Goebbels constructed a mobile assembly of images and sounds that manifest themselves autonomously, in a profound attempt to make perceptible their synesthetic thingness unimpeded by performative agency. Of course, whatever might be noted as “agency”—human intervention—is made internal to the thing in what is a strange reversal of embodiment. The three-dimensionality of the sound event, if this can be said, is such that the typically disembodied human element (the artist’s hand, eye, voice) that’s always embedded in the art object is curiously subordinated, or assimilated, in the autonomy of the piece itself—and it is rare how literally the word “autonomy” figures in this case. Recent stagings have created more of an installation than performance atmosphere where spectator-audiences can literally enter the ins and outs of the multiple sculptural space."

South issue # 7 DOCUMENTA 14 #2
on: Stifters Dinge (Music Theatre)