Paul Schütze; Emma

The video work ‘Emma’ was recorded by Gvoon Arthur Schmidt with Emma at a different location on Thursday, 8 August 2024 at 15:49.

The audible sound of the video work ‘Emma’ is based entirely on music realised by Paul Schütze with the title ‘Without Thought’. The music was conceived and realised by him for an installation work for a video projection (stereo scent and stereo sound). The music includes contributions by Ko Ishikawa (Sho), Daniel Pennie (guitars), Raoul Björkenheim (cello) and Paul Schütze (electronics) himself. In 2018, the installation ‘Without Thought’ was shown for the first time at the ‘Mackintosh Lane’ gallery in London.

Paul Schütze himself describes the music for his installation as a kind of stereo scent, an important component based on a film that was shot in Greece in 2016. The starting point was a cliff that he has visited many times. The strange sensation of the water curving into the hemisphere of the sky at this point was always an astonishing phenomenon for him. Patterns were constantly circling on the surface of the sea, describing wind movements. The entire landscape felt sensitive to him. The audible sound was developed by him in direct reaction to the image. The stereo image of the installation work is unusual in that it has no centre. Each element is in constant motion in the image field. For this reason, it is best heard through loudspeakers. The sound is harmonious as well as structurally and texturally indissoluble and flowing. His aim was to emphasise the emphatic formlessness of the water. The olfactory elements were created last. They began as a complete scent, encompassing both the marine and terrestrial aspects of the place. The image that emerges on sight excludes the land, but assumes that the viewer is on land, so the two zones are inextricably linked in this film. The entire resulting fragrance was then divided into earth and sea elements. The two groups were scattered into the room from positions corresponding to those of the sound scattering. The two scents mix in the room to varying degrees depending on the position and movement of the viewer/spectator/oil factor. This work continues a theme of anti-narrative that has been present in his sound works for almost four decades. Stories are invented in order to imbue the surfaces of life with meaning.

Paul Schütze is a London-based Australian artist who has been working in the fields of sound, photography, video and installation for forty years. He was a founding member of the Australian experimental band Laughing Hands and Phantom City, an international collective of musicians working both live and virtually from various locations around the world. He has performed sound and film works in over a dozen countries and has released over thirty albums of original music. Over the decades he has collaborated with Bill Laswell, Simone de Haan, Toshinori Kondo, Clive Bell, David Toop, Dirk Wachtaeler, Jah Wobble, Raoul Björkenheim, Andrew Hulme, Max Eastly, Robert Hamson, Thomas Köner, Lol Coxhill and Alex Buess. His artworks have been exhibited in numerous international galleries and museums. He has also collaborated with artists such as James Turrell, Josiah McElheny and Isaac Julien. In 2014, Paul began developing olfactory elements for his exhibition Silent Surface and created a perfume called In Libro De Tenebris. In 2016, he founded the perfume house Paul Schütze Perfume with his partner Chris Rickwood. In 2022 they moved from London, where Paul has lived for thirty years, to the Kent coast. Paul is currently working on a book about sensory ecology.

More detailed information on Paul Schütze's extensive oeuvre and work can be found on his own website at: http://www.paulschutze.com/. His previous publications can also be found at: https://paulschutze.bandcamp.com/music.

The 64-minute music ‘Without Thought’ was released and published in 2020 in a limited edition of 300 copies as a CD on the label ‘aufabwegen’. Further information can be found at: https://www.aufabwegen.de/label/archive/805 or directly at: https://www.aufabwegen.de/ In addition, all previous releases by ‘aufabwegen’ can be found at https://aufabwegen.bandcamp.com/.

Trapped in the depths of the innermost, where darkness and silence merge. Alone, isolated in a room, inside, where being is only a fleeting breath, barely tangible, barely perceptible, only palpable. Sounds waft through the darkness, everywhere, in your head, in your body, in every cell of your being. They echo, pulsate, roar, break through the last remnants of silence, tug at your thoughts, your mind. No real peace, just an endless endurance, a standstill in the middle of time. The boundary between dream and reality becomes blurred; everything loses form and meaning. What has happened feels like an endless labyrinth without an exit, in a kind of embryo. One form. The origin. It is the steps in a circle, without a tangible destination, trapped in a search that has no beginning and no end. Only a hope for sleep, for all to fall asleep, but the hope remains unfulfilled as one falls deeper, lost in echoes. These echoes, not just their own, but the whispered voices of others who are also seeking the same path into the darkness. A jumble of voices, of feelings, of memories, which envelop everything inside you like a fog until you can hardly breathe. The echoes inside merge with the voices of others that you can't see but that you can feel; it's like an endless symphony of pain, doubt and unfulfilled desires. And in the midst of all this, an incessant search for something that can hardly be named, a kind of hope for peace, the end of the noise, the end of having to endure. But everything is just a hope, and the darkness that surrounds you doesn't allow any answers, just more questions that keep going round in circles.

The entire "Innen" project and the resulting video work "Emma" are essentially based on the existence of a black rubber cell, which is set up in its original state in a different location. This cell as a space, or as a created place, has stayed with me ever since my first contact with it at its original location in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Perhaps also because when you enter this room, it just presses down on you, on everything. You can't put it into words. At least I can't. In this project, this black padded cell serves as a kind of metaphor for all the other rooms in this world that have been turned into places, where people are brought into an exceptional situation by unscrupulous others, where those affected are then completely alone with themselves. Something is created in the minds of those affected when a certain kind of empathy is present - in other words, the ability and willingness to understand and feel the feelings, thoughts and emotions of other people. However, everyone thinks differently,

The Stasi's black rubber cell (detention cell, tranquillisation room) exists in reality far below as a real Room 2 at the lowest point in the basement of the north wing (cell wing) of the former central remand prison (UHA) of the Ministry of State Security (MfS) of the German Demokratic Republic (GDR) and today's memorial in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen..

Everything about the ‘Innen’ project is deliberately not externally determined, neither financially nor intellectually.

Visit Youtube directly for further and other video works createdf  or take a look at all the works created so far for "Innen" here,

The "Innen" project is managed by GMO - The Label.