Location: The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle

The Exploding Collage season explores how avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century expanded collage practice into vastly different media. Comprised of three exhibitions – Exploding Collage, Gathering, and The Loud and the Soft Speakers – the programme has been inspired by the idea that Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn Wall is a work of ‘exploded collage’, applying his collage technique on an architectural scale.

The Loud and the Soft Speakers

The Loud and the Soft Speakers originated from Heather Ross’ research into the 'pointless' collage (also known as Untitled (with Porcelain Shard)), created by Kurt Schwitters in 1946, roughly a year before he began work on the Merz Barn. Through examining the found materials in the ‘pointless’ collage, Ross made the material connection between this and an early performance work by Schwitters known as The Silence Poem, also referred to as Leise (German for ‘quiet' or 'softly’). Unlike Schwitters’ poem The Ursonate, which is recognised as a pioneering example of sound poetry, The Silence Poem is little-known, partly because there is no surviving recording of it. In her re-imagining of this largely unexplored work, Ross examines it as a work which plays with the meaning of language and gesture in relation to power and resistance, which was inherently ephemeral and altered according to the specific site and or context within which the work was performed.
The Loud and the Soft Speakers focuses on Schwitters' performance of this work in Hutchinson Internment Camp, on the Isle of Man during World War II, where he was known to have adapted this work from German into English. Filmed on the same site and featuring musician and performance artist Florian Kaplick, it employs performance as an exploratory tool for the visualisation of the historical and environmental influences which contributed to Schwitters’ experience of internment, and subsequently the development of The Silence Poem.

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