Musical reading from NOTHING MORE
Augustin Maurs

Link to readig: mediathek.hfbk.net/lecture2go-portlet/player/iframe

The project NOTHING MORE explores the voice as a resource of expression and transformation,
from phonation and speech to singing and political vocalness. The title echoes the book of Mladen
Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, in which the philosopher argues that if the voice does not
contribute to making sense, it is nevertheless an “excess of meaning”, and “the very texture of the
social”. The project was commissioned by Bergen Assembly 2022, it consists of a mixed media
installation and a piece for choir and organ premiered in the Bergen Cathedral.

Augustin Maurs is a musician and composer based in Berlin. Beyond the actual production of
music, his work explores what he calls the “conditions of musicality”: how music is bound with nonmusical
things, signs, gestures, systems, and how it passes through medias, histories, and bodies.
His practice ranges from performative interventions to collaborative concerts and installations, and
sometimes extends to curatorial projects. Maurs often looks into musical notions or concepts,
which he re-contextualises and politicises, as in 2021 with his project KANŌN, Q NŪN, CANON
(...) a collective exploration of musical rules and tuning systems at Berlin’s KW Institute for
Contemporary Art. Other recent projects include BEING OUT OF TUNE (favourite songs of
dictators), a cabaret-style parodic concert presented at both the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic
Arts (2019) and the Volksbühne in Berlin (2020). His piece I HAVE NO WORDS (2018) was
conceived for the world’s biggest propaganda loudspeakers on the Kinmen Island (Taiwan) and
presented at the Busan Biennale 2018. For his project ENCORES, presented at the Teatro Goldoni
in Venice (2019), he involved other artists including Pierre Huyghe, Saâdane Afif, Annika Larsson
and Satch Hoyt to develop musical works on recurrence, redundancy, and surplus. His project
NOTHING MORE was commissioned by the Bergen Assembly 2022 and explores the human voice
as a ressource. Maurs is a faculty member of the Metabolic Museum–University at KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin, and curator of the music programme of artgeneva.