SOUND MAKES SPACE

Doron Polak - Curator and Artist, Markers Founder

Amir Cohen - Co-Founder, Curator and Designer

 

“Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal… If it says the same thing as the words, why look? …My theatre is a formal theatre… in theatre all elements are equally important… words, music… each of these elements stands for itself… no illustration.” — Bob Wilson

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Robert Wilson was a stage director, designer, draughtsman and lighting artist, was regarded as one of the most significant figures in experimental and post-avant-garde theatre worldwide. Wilson, who passed away this year, worked for decades in Europe, particularly in Germany, creating many groundbreaking productions and collaborating with international musicians and artists.

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Hans Jörn Brandenburg is a German musician, composer and musical director whose work centres on music for theatre. At the same time, he is an active member of the art space The 4th wall in Berlin, where the initiative for this exhibition originated: the tribute project Sound makes space.​​

 

Hans-Jörn Brandenburg and Robert Wilson collaborated on nine major productions from the early 1990s onward, including Wilson’s most recent work Seven Solitudes, premiered in Kaunas, Lithuania. Their artistic dialogue began with The Black Rider and continued through productions such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Peter Pan, Faust, Devil Songs, and others.

 

Brandenburg’s music does not seek virtuosity as display. Its force lies instead in its capacity to shape theatrical space: precise, restrained, and extended across time. His compositions often unfold through repetition, subtle variation, suspended tones, and gradual sonic accumulation. This made them profoundly attuned to Wilson’s stage language, where light, gesture, and movement evolve with an almost mathematical slowness. Within this formal clarity, Brandenburg sustained an undercurrent of emotional tension.

 

In The Black Rider, although the songs were written by Tom Waits, Brandenburg played a decisive role in shaping the overall sonic world. Wilson’s dark, gothic, and surreal imagery found its counterpart in a musical language marked by distortion, grotesque humour, half-dissonant harmonies, and deliberately rough textures. What emerged was a kind of dark cabaret stripped to a minimalist skeleton: music that could appear unstable or chaotic, yet was constructed with rigorous precision, enabling exact synchronisation with light and motion.

 

In later productions such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Brandenburg calibrated music not to illustrate feeling, but to articulate structure. Timed with exceptional precision to speech, rhythm, and movement, the score created an atmosphere that was at once cool, meditative, and charged. Wilson’s theatre is built on the stretching of time; Brandenburg answered this through suspension, delay, silence, and rhythmic control. In Devil Songs, playful, almost mischievous patterns accompanied bitterly ironic texts, while darker harmonies unsettled the surface with emotional ambiguity.

 

Their collaboration reveals a rare artistic trust: music serving the stage image without surrendering its own autonomy. Brandenburg’s contribution to Wilson’s theatre was not descriptive but architectural.

 

The exhibition Sound Makes Space, produced by the international Artists’ Museum organisation at Storania in Venice, is dedicated to this enduring exchange. Bringing together artist books, photographs, archival traces, Brandenburg’s previously unseen drawings, and a central installation by Amir Cohen, it reflects not only a creative partnership, but a shared understanding of theatre as a composed relationship between sound, time, light, and image.

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Doron Polak, Curator of the exhibition