place EIGENHEIM Weimar, Asbachstraße 1, 99423 Weimar
Opening 03.Dec.2022 at 7 pm 
Performance 09.Dec. at 19 o’clock
Duration 04.Dec. – 15.Dec.2022

We hereby cordially invite you to the exhibition of Warrick Swinney from South Africa. Warrick Swinney is the second participant in the Radio Art Residency Weimar in 2022. With a deep-rooted interest in sound, music, and politics, Warrick Swinney’s approach to sound arts is rooted in a solid DIY aesthetic that grew out of his involvement in the post-punk ethic at Shifty Studios in the 1980s and during the turbulent years between the collapse of apartheid and South Africa’s transition to democracy.

The title of this exhibition is a line from the poem “Supernatural Disaster”¹ by Lesego Rampolokeng, a Sowetan poet with whom Swinney has collaborated since the late 1980s. The Orwellian connotation in this context is intentional, referring to the metaphorical “farm” still used by cadres of the revolution. That time, however, has passed. The fields lie fallow. Industry has come to a virtual standstill. Explosions and smoke from malfunctioning machinery are blamed on counterrevolutionary forces, and we are left speechless. “The word decays to zero sound,” says Rampolokeng. There is no dialogue, and the poet’s voice is silenced.

This decay is key to much of the exhibition. Scrambling and jamming signals is the source of the video material, where special scrambling is used to deny the viewer access, dissolving the purpose of the video. Some of the videos Swinney has made emphasize this feature, suggesting an unintentional or accidental beauty.