Clould: The Supernatural and Possible Worlds through the art of Marc Behrens
I plan to present three projects. The longtime project “Clould”, the collaborative performance project “Eure Welt – Ein Audiodrive” with composer Hannes Seidl, and a yet untitled project for a film that does and will not exist as such.
“Clould” (2011–2024) deals with the reality of airborne mass transport and the history of supposed supernatural beings residing in the clouds. Such air travel propels large groups of human beings – passive by force – through a space that once belonged to mythological beings and energies. And to the clouds, of course. “Clould” consists of 95 minutes of music, five microstories, the libretto for the fifth movement, a number of aerial photographs and text charts, and a performance concept including the first three movements. In the performance, three video projections are used.
“Eure Welt – Ein Audiodrive” (2025) took place in Frankfurt as a guided “audio drive” in two identical cars, each equipped with an audio system and operated by a performer, hosting two passengers. Rooted in music theatre, the idea was to regard the city as a dynamic stage or a movie set, while focusing on the recent regional situation in medical and esoteric care work and visiting social housing projects of the “New Frankfurt” (1920s). The sound inside the cars was composed exclusively of supposed healing frequencies. “Eure Welt” was a coproduction with the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
The yet untitled project is in development right now. A film is set in a hypothetical building, a giant sphere (inspired by French revolutionary architecture), immersive to the main character, who experiences an alteration of the body while being in a film screening with countless other people. Time is not linear, and it remains unclear if the whole setting is probably a dream rather than a documented or fictional story. A film within a film, a personal sphere of experience within a (maybe imagined) architectural sphere that turns into a solid celestial body. The aim is to create a sound piece that invokes the film as internal images, while parallely reading the script. I am currently studying the Soviet montage theory and the concept of Kino-Eye (Vertov, Pudovkin) in order to rethink sound composition.
Marc Behrens
Marc Behrens’s artistic practice is deeply engaged with philosophical questions concerning reality, perception, representation, temporality, embodiment, and the production of possible worlds. His projects use sound, moving image, performance, architecture, and spatial experience not simply as artistic media, but as means of questioning how reality is constructed and experienced: where the boundaries lie between the real and the imagined, the material and the supernatural, individual and collective perception, and documentation and fiction. Clould, for example, connects the material reality of contemporary air travel with historical and mythical conceptions of the clouds, raising questions about technological modernity, belief, and changing forms of human experience. Eure Welt – Ein Audiodrive similarly transforms the city into a kind of cinematic and philosophical space in which questions of care, social organisation, perception, and mediated experience become part of the work itself. His current film/sound project further engages questions of cinematic ontology, nonlinear time, consciousness, and the relationship between an image that exists and one that is only imagined.
The presentation will therefore provide researchers and students with an opportunity to engage directly with an artist whose work opens a productive dialogue between philosophical inquiry, film theory, sound, and contemporary artistic practice, contributing to the broader investigation of cinema as a mode of thinking as well as a medium of representation.
For registration, please send an email to: mailecolbert@fcsh.unl.pt.