The Bondage of Electrons

In the year 1795, the Spanish physician and inventor Don Francisco Salva Campillo introduced the concept of a telegraph consisting of 22 pairs of cable held by 22 people. Each person embodied a letter of the alphabet and called that letter out loud after having felt a power surge. One person wrote the message down. Later on, Salva Campillo is supposed to have worked with frogs’ legs and test tubes in which the current dissolved the water. By performing or maybe even premiering this experiment, Hemauer/Keller remind of the old nexus between electricity and communication, and the efforts undertaken to use electric power in communicating over long distances; and at a time, when electric power and its uses or possible applications only recently had been discovered. That the current-carrying body plays a central role in this re-enactment of incorporeal communication, may be one the ironies of history fascinating both artists.

Extract from the exhibition description by Anke Hoffmann und Yvonne Volkart