In my youth, when I was about 19 years old, I visited the Kunsthalle in Kiel. Since I grew up on the edge of Europe, i.e. in Dithmarschen and therefore almost exactly on the opposite side of Schleswig-Holstein geographically, at least from the perspective of Kielers, and since the Kunsthalle was the most extraordinary place for contemporary art in Schleswig-Holstein, I hoped that a visit would broaden my irrationally remote rural perspective. My goal was a comprehensive presentation of curated individual Pop Art positions, but it could also have been an Andy Warhol exhibition, if I remember correctly.

Immediately after entering the exhibition and in great expectation of seeing originals, however, all my attention culminated in an arrangement of different buckets loosely distributed on the floor of the large exhibition space. They were placed in this arrangement to catch the rainwater dripping through the ceiling, but I only realized this later. Initially, the scenario in my perception was by no means determined by a roof damage and the prevention of a caretaker, but by the auratic moment of the museum context and the sound.

For me, this was an extraordinary situation that captivated me and the accidental diversity of the buckets in their designs was further proof of the acceptance of an artistic intervention. Added to this was the extremely entertaining acoustic event of the dripping ceiling, the play of falling drops from a great height, because it was raining cats and dogs outside and the kind of audible permeability of the roof produced a concert of acoustic impulses of varying speed and a wide range of resonating buckets in various pitches and rhythms, which was enchanting to my ears. Never before had I experienced such a concertante moment, so close to reality on the substance of a building. I understood the whole thing as an ingenious staging of architectural material sounds, here determined by the situation under the conditions of the architecture, the museum space and the life of the liquid, the water, with its acoustic aggregate states. My enthusiasm was great.
However, when I asked the supervisory staff who emptied the full buckets and whether the whole thing was based on a composed sequence of events, it quickly and became clear that only the roof of the Kunsthalle was defective and that the buckets limited the water damage. (Text: Roof Damage)