ACT III – Erin Honeycutt, Cru Encarnação und Saverio Cantoni: The Secret Life of Ekphrasis

Held in the Bärenzwinger, this workshop takes ekphrasis, written description of images, not as a genre but as a methodology — a practice of translation between senses, mediums, and forms of attention. Taking its cue from Stevie Wonder’s ‘The Secret Life of Plants’, a soundtrack composed from written descriptions of a documentary never fully seen, we ask: what travels when one sense hands its information to another, and what is necessarily lost, transformed, or invented in the crossing?

The workshop unfolds within Nina Paszkowski’s exhibition Furore, which returns to the Bärenzwinger’s history of spectacle and asks what public attention does when it turns from fascination to unease to anger. Paszkowski names this anger through the Furies, the mythological avengers who, through mercy, become the benevolent Eumenides, a transformation that surfaces materially as ceramic proliferations erupt from the enclosure’s walls.

Participants write and mark-make in response to this unfolding — the room’s held silence, the unheard duration of the bears’ lives, cut through now with the Furies’ unresolved question of vengeance or mercy. These fragments are gathered into a single scroll, a shared score, performed together in the evening as a kind of orchestra, through a live radio transmission via THF, voices sounding out what the walls could not otherwise say.