Hartung | Trenz

The Ambient Festival 2021 "Civilization of Love" in St. Aposteln, Cologne coincides with the 1000th anniversary of this basilica.

The light installation ZEIT RAUM 16:40 by Detlef Hartung and Georg Trenz, developed for this purpose, covers a length of 1000 seconds and is divided into three sections of approximately equal length. Each of the three sections is assigned a biblical passage, which provides a basic theme and excerpts of the text material.

The first sequence (5:30 min) quotes the book of Genesis, chapter 1. It is "In the Beginning" about origin and birth, about the emergence of the world, of perception and ideas as flowing processes. Seemingly dichotomous concepts emerge from the initially shimmering blue altar area and the main organ opposite, move away from each other and cross the church space. They are the harbingers of countless letters that float vertically upwards like plankton, condensing more and more. Eventually they form into lines and legible texts that fill and restructure the basilica.

The second sequence (5:30 min) is about the course and cycle of time, about becoming and passing away. The well-known passage from Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, "Everything has its time, each has its hour" describes life as movement, unity, and interplay of opposites. Condensed lines, which appear as bright line segments, flow first vertically then also horizontally across the church walls. The resulting sign of the cross fans out and partially covers the nave with a dense text carpet of light. Wave-like impulses flow through the room and fade away again into the darkness.

In the third and last sequence (5:40 min), texts from the Sermon on the Mount, Mt. 5,1 - 7,29  St. Apostles. They stand for the vision of a "civilization of love", of peaceful and understanding coexistence. They lead the 1000 year history of the basilica into the future. The central form of the set texts is the circle. This is also where the only colored sequence in the typo animation appears, red as a contrasting color to the blue initial dawn and as a symbolic color of the "civilization of love".

All three texts are among the best known biblical passages, have a similar litany-like structure, and often used similar linguistic devices and stylistic figures, such as anaphora, the repetition of a word and phrase at the beginning.

The first two texts, however, predominantly use dichotomies and antonyms, i.e. pairs of opposites. With these pairs of opposites, such as proximity and distance, faith and doubt, light and shadow, poverty and wealth, home and foreign, world and universe, love and indifference, silence and noise, rest and movement, form and content, gentleness and irascibility, fullness and emptiness, hope and despair, etc., etc., the 14 static slide projections also occupy the lower area of the church and the two side aisles. They stand for being and non-being, for the ups and downs, the ups and downs in the course of life, in the passage of time. Most of the concepts from the parish council's collection of ideas can also be incorporated here.

The Sermon on the Mount, the textual basis of the third animated sequence does not use these contrasts. This text takes a clear stand and strives for unity and unambiguity: LOVE YOUR ENEMIES ALSO BE PERFECT.