INHABIT #2 // Lea Letzel
Foto: Frederike Wetzels
February – May 2020
Lea Letzel is a multimedia artist, director and pyrotechnician living and working in Cologne and Reykjavik. In her artistic practice she concentrates on the development of interdisciplinary scenic and performative work at the intersection of sound and music, media arts, dance and space.
Lea Letzel is especially interested in the concert format and questions around the conditions and conventions of performance situations. The examination of the relationship between art and music is also thematized spatially as her works are produced and performed in different forums between the white cube, black box and in the context of new music. Her visual and acoustic material is equally versatile and indeterminate, moving between pyrotechnical elements and the soundscape of a skate hall. Most recently, she was invited to the Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto as a scholarship holder of the Goethe-Institut to study Japanese pyrotechnics.
During her residency she will continue working on a project based on the fireworks notation of the Japanese chemist and fireworker Takeo Shimizu who she discovered during a residency at the Goethe Institute Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto. Around 1965 he developed a notational system for fireworks displays based on conventional musical notation. Taking this as a starting point she will deal with idea of notation as a multifaceted system between instruction, performance text and choreographic manual. In this context she will also reflect on the question of hierarchy between music and fireworks and its sonic potential which can be of equal value next to the visuality. As part of this, she will team up with different scientists from several departments, among others with musicologist Dr. Lara Pearson.
Biography
Lea Letzel studied at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Since 2015 she is also trained as a pyrotechnician and special effects technician. She has participated in international exhibitions as well as performances at Witte de With, Rotterdam; Maschinenhaus Essen; Theater Duisburg; Philharmony, Duisburg; Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Bonner Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung, Bonn; FrankfurtLAB, Frankfurt am Main; Acht Brücken Festival, Köln; Edith- Russ- Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg; PACT Zollverein, Essen.
