The Magenza Protocols — Transmission After Rupture

Sound installation developed during a residency of the UNESCO World Heritage Site SchUM at the former Judenwache in Mainz, the eighteenth-century checkpoint to the city's Jewish ghetto.

Thirty-seven wooden transport crates form a pyramidal structure. Ten contain transducers that transform the wood into resonant bodies; the others remain silent. The installation draws on liturgical chants of the pre-Holocaust Mainz tradition, recorded under the supervision of Rabbi Leo Trepp.

A probabilistic system continuously distributes the recordings across the structure. Voices emerge, overlap, recede, and return according to an internal logic shaped by time, environment, and chance. The recordings remain unchanged; only their spatial and temporal organisation shifts.

The work approaches cultural memory not as an archive, but as a process of transmission unfolding through resonance, interruption, and absence.