Polytope Experiences through Iannis Xenakis and Beyond

Jazmina Figueroa: First, could you please explain to me how you two came together for the occasion of The Hermit(2023)?

Viron Erol Vert: We both met, if I remember correctly and consciously, at Berghain’s entrance. I was working my second shift on that weekend and Matteo wanted to get into the club with a mutual friend. I guess that’s something like 12 or 14 years ago, which was a different club scene, a different Berlin, and a totally different world.

Then, I remembered that Matteo had mentioned a sculpture by me called Abraham I (2014–21) that I had built for the show of Peter Lang and Christoph Tannert for the 40-year anniversary of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, in one of his texts.

Besides that, we live in the same neighborhood in Berlin. So, sometimes we meet, mostly by chance at the same coffee place during our work and studio breaks. We know each other from different frames, layers, and moments that, in the end, have accumulated into a mutual exchange of our projects and exhibitions, like my current show, The Hermit at the Museum of Modern Art in Athens (EMST). Today, we met at the traffic lights of Schlesisches Tor by chance, maybe destiny, and we talked about finishing this interview – so, here we go.

Matteo Pasquinelli: Aside from extracurricular activities that contribute to our overlapping cognitive explorations, indeed, I once asked Viron if I could refer to his large sculpture Abraham I for a piece (in e-flux journal) on the metabolism of light, energy, and information – a piece in which I was also wondering and wandering around darkness as a metaphor of knowledge against the worn-out metaphor of »enlightenment.« Then over a cup of coffee, more recently, we went back to the pagan substrate of European culture that great historians such as Carlo Ginzburg investigated in his 2017 book, Storia notturna. At least in Italian, Storia notturna is a very poetic title, an anthropological reference that again goes back to the many lives of the night.

JF: Viron, could you describe the significance of the nightclub setting that inspired the exhibition design of The Hermit and how that defines your connection to the work of Iannis Xenakis?

VEV: The connection and links between nightlife, Xenakis’s work, and my artistic practice are manifold and are layered in multiple ways into my installation from different perspectives. First is my personal relation to Berlin nightlife, as I have worked since 1997 – over 25 years with some breaks – in Berlin nightlife as a bouncer, which started during my early studies at the university. I started to work at some SNAX parties and then at Ostgut, which became what is now known as Berghain. Beside that, I have worked at other clubs and spaces like Bunker, Rio, Club der Visionäre, Bar 25, Rio, White Trash, and so on.

Experiencing thousands of guests of all genders, sexual interests and fetishes passing through the door with all their fears and hopes, but also with their expectations and witnessed experiences – watching human beings, layers of societies from different perspectives and understanding humans in relation to sound, light, drugs, and architecture in all these uncountable, endless party nights and weekends – has shaped my personality.

I actually understood this influence, which became a part of my current artistic practice, quite late.  As it happened in an unplanned and unconscious way, almost effortlessly, I only realized this aspect of my work in the past few years. Maybe this understanding is also a question of age, as I feel I am entering a new period of my life.

In the end we are always the quintessence of our experiences, consciously or subconsciously. Nightlife and rave culture is like a parallel universe with its own rules, skills, and habits, maybe sometimes a bit more honest and unpatterned than the world outside of a club, but this seemingly endless freedom and hedonistic way of life can have challenges and confrontations, and this duality is what I feel resonates for me in Xenakis’s works.

JF: Viron, how did you incorporate elements like architectural models, mathematics, geometric shapes, and the Fibonacci sequence¹ in your installation The Hermit and where were these aspects located in Xenakis’s work?

VEV: There are two main paths I have developed in parallel to one another – one was to analyze the museum space in his measurements, sizes, forms, and characteristics. Out of that, I prepared with my team a 3-D plan of the space to understand it from all directions, views, and levels. As I also personally believe that space is like a living entity, my spatial installations always try to open a communication and conversation with the space my work is shown within. It is the kind of relationship the installation wants to start, when I migrate with a project into a space for a period, and at the end I share an experience or a dialogue with the space. Therefore, the architectural structure gives or adds a certain frame, beat, and pulse to the artistic approach and development, but at the same time the space is purposely defragmented and taken over through the artistic intervention in certain moments – almost dissolving and reflecting –depending on the perspective.

In the end, everything that you see in The Hermit is built on the number six and the Fibonacci series. We have six colors in six steps ascending in two directions; six sound-chime pavilions with six divisible numbers of chimes. All the color steps, all the lengths of chimes, and heights of pavilions are developed from the Fibonacci series. We also have six sound pieces by six sound artists giving a contemporary glimpse into Xenakis’s vision. Through these seemingly quite strict rules, we could build a space within the space that tries to override given measures and perspectives but with the wish to find balance in chaos or chaos in balance, a composition that brings all the different perspectives, materials, surfaces, forms, lines, and colors into relation.