Chryssa Tsampazi

The work was presented at the Kunstverein Tiergarten, in Berlin. I invited members of the Greek-German choir “Polyphonia”, based in Berlin, to do ensemble improvisations. The only direction I gave them, concerned the repetition of the following verse: “The good times are coming, they will be coming real soon / The good times are coming when they come I ll be there.” For over two hours, the duration of the performance, the choir remained locked in the manager’s office. To symbolically free access to that place, I removed all the doors along the way to the room and leaned them against the walls. The audience of the exhibition could hear the choir’s singing echo through the corridors and out into the street, through the open windows of the room, and could vaguely make out silhouettes behind the closed glass door. The condition of the choir’s incarceration in contrast to their happy message was decisive both for the process of improvisation and the listeners’ perception of the message. After the night of the performance and for the duration of the exhibition, the choir singing was heard emanating from the closed manager’s room as a sound installation.