Andrea Maurer with Sara Manente, Lissie Rettenwander & Bruno Pocheron / Unspelling

We reclaim the meaning of words and build the foundation for our own house. Our voices comprise many tongues. Unspelling is a performative text montage in which Andrea Maurer, Sara Manente, Lissie Rettenwander and Bruno Pocheron hijack the language of newspapers. In a deconstructive manner, they penetrate the inner workings of sentence structures and abduct words in order to set them free. Posing as miners of and intruders into the order of language, they do not only lay a finger on language, but they also illustrate what the eye, the foot, the tongue and the ear can do. They exit the space of mutual intelligibility. Headlines serve as the basis for language material, keywords are being perforated, and paragraphs will be hollowed out. Unspelling dissects in order to create new links, to monitor and compose: One person reads, a word falls under the table, the leg of the chair is made to hit in time, a shoe hurtles through the air, the lights go down.

Andrea Maurer lives and works in Vienna. She examines, dissects and twists connections between language, reality and perception in mostly performative and/or installative formats. She realised many projects with the studio 5 collective between 2007 and 2013. Her piece Gesprächsgegenstände (2013) won the Media Art Award of the State of Salzburg.

She was awarded the H13 Performance Prize, sponsored by Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, in 2016 for SELBSTZERLEGUNG. The Austrian daily Der Standard described her as “highly adept in taking language, symbols and meanings apart. The topics addressed by her cleverly take the logic of everyday communication to the point of absurdity”.

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