Articles Available Online

There are many ways to make sense of the world, through language, speech and text, but also the senses and their extensions In his book The Five Senses (Les cinq sens, 1985), Michel Serres encourages his reader to think about touch, sound, taste, smell and sight as continually exceeding the body The senses knot together as the body meets and interacts with the world ‘I mingle with the world which mingles itself in me,’ he writes Silent, the body is saved from its addiction to words Released, it builds itself anew through sensation Kristina Buch’s grandfather stopped speaking aged seventeen For much of his life he worked on a single musical score, leaving behind exactly one hundred and twenty sheets of notation, for which he provided no clear sequential order Buch gave her grandfather’s work to composer and musician Iko Birk four years ago Birk was faced with a challenge: the score had no beginning, middle or end, as a score probably should It contained, for the most part, unconventional musical notation: small colourful drawings and words, which Buch’s grandfather had erased entirely on twenty-five of the pages, leaving them punctured with small holes This careful removal is a kind of notation, like the drawings and words Undoing a gesture creates another The holes evidence a measured and protracted violence, but they are also openings, physical breaks in the score that offer a personal negotiation of reality up to interpretation and elucidation, translation and narration   Trained in Biology and Theology, Buch studied Fine Art Sculpture at the Royal College of Art and under Rosemarie Trockel at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf  She was the youngest artist to participate in dOCUMENTA 13, and was appointed Assistant Professor at Goethe University, Frankfurt in 2013 Buch tests the rituals and rites associated with people, things, materials and living beings using installations, interventions, video, text, objects, and ‘life-gestures’, as she describes her performances She also tests the limits of disclosure, what it means for a person or event to be fictional or real Often, she plants a seed of doubt from which