The Space Between
AV Installation at Festungskirche Ehrenbreitstein - Koblenz
In cooperation with AKM Koblenz and GDKE
16.08. - 13.09.2026
The reverberation of a room. The beliefs of people. The digital signals that surround us continuously. All of these invisible forces, which elude human perception, are nevertheless always present. The invisible has no fixed form, yet it determines how we experience space. With The Space Between, sculptor and sound artist Clemens Behr (*1985, Koblenz) develops a site-specific installation for the Festungskirche Ehrenbreitstein that explores precisely this condition of invisibility. Sculpture and sound converge as components of a shared resonant space.
Rather than reproducing the church interior, Behr reconstructs it anew. Round arches, window shapes, and architectural elements emerge as sculptural mock-ups within the church. They evoke fragments of a stage set or the scenery of a science-fiction film. Familiar forms detach from their original context and begin to generate new spaces. Behr’s works emerge from his own vocabulary of forms and materials, which condense into spatial collages. Different temporalities, memories, and meanings coexist within them and remain in flux. Behr deliberately leaves the sculptures raw, almost archaic. Repairs are not concealed but carefully revealed. This play with ambiguity is central to the work, opening up spaces for visitors’ own associations.
Sound, too, acts as an invisible component of the space. A sound installation responds to the presence of visitors. Bluetooth signals from nearby mobile phones are translated into musical sequences, turning invisible data into audible relationships. In this way, people influence the sound without consciously controlling it. Old floppy disk drives and synthesizers merge with the church’s natural reverberation to form a composition that exists only in the present moment. Ephemerality is therefore intrinsic to the work. New soundscapes are continuously generated, only to dissolve again into the infinite ether.
Here lies one of the work’s most compelling shifts. The church has traditionally been understood as a place of faith and therefore as a space for the invisible. Behr extends this idea with a second layer. Equally invisible today are the digital networks that permeate everyday life. Historic architecture encounters technologies associated with the 1990s. Productive frictions arise between the two. Spirituality and technology appear not as opposites, but as different manifestations of the invisible forces that shape how we coexist. Alongside references to science fiction, hauntological modes of thought also resonate, without moving into the foreground of the work.
Transformation also characterizes the history of the exhibition site. Its changing functions, from church to powder magazine, workshop, storage space, and finally a venue for art, continue to reverberate in the present. Behr’s installation responds to this layered history and its remaining traces through a spatial experience. The past appears as something that continues to echo through the building. For Behr, The Space Between describes less an exact location than a state: a state of invisibility, situated between architecture and sound, body and data. Perhaps the work ultimately generates a sense of what it means to exist within the conditions of contemporary society. The invisible, too, and that which lies between things and ourselves, determines our reality. Perhaps this is precisely where resonance begins.
Pola van den Hövel
