Touch Amplifier
This work begins when two sandpaper robots enter the stage. Their blood red suits of armor remind us of medeval knights, ready to go into battle. But they are made out of heavy, industrial grade sandpaper. The rough sandpaper surfaces of the suits transpose each movement into scraping sounds, into a n amazingly subtle music.

By wearing a costume we usually change what we look like. It is less common to change not only our visual appearance but our sonic appearance as well. The sounds our bodies make in everyday life are mostly quite soft: Footsteps, breathing, the sound of clothes moving. By wearing the sandpaper costumes Özgür Erkök Moroder and Steffi Weismann replace their soft and smooth skin with rough sandpaper.

About the Artist
Steffi is a performance and sound Artist. She lives in Berlin. Her works often cross borders between visual art and music. With a focus on audio performances, mixed media compositions, interactive sound installations and interventions in public spaces, her working methods and the structure of her works are dialogical at their core and reference the fluxus movement. Weismann connects bodies, things and sounds in space. The settings of her works are performative, combining analog and digital means. In recent years, the transfer of tactile experiences into sonic processes has played a central role.

Since her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, she has maintained an international concert schedule with the Ensemble Maulwerker. Steffi received numerous prizes and scholarships and has presented her solo works in South Africa, New Zealand, Portugal, Turkey, the United States and Switzerland, among other countries. She works in many collaborations, including with Annette Krebs, Georg Klein, Özgür Erkök Moroder, Çiğdem Üçüncü, and Janine Eisenächer, with whom she has curated the series Ready Making – on performative sound art at Errant Sound since 2019.

And here is Steffi’s homepage, brimming with documentation of her works.