Clusterfuck Experimental Sound Performance for Electric Violin by Tony Wagner with Schmale Bottle in an Afterhour Setting by Wally Salner

“On Saturday, June 14, 2025, Toni Schmale’s sculpture Schmale Flasche will be supplemented by an intervention conceived by Wally Salner and entitled Clusterfuck Experimental Sound Performance for Electric Violin by Tony Wagner with Schmale Bottle in an Afterhour Setting by Wally Salner. The site will be the surroundings of a one-person tent placed in the space between the Schmale Bottle and Mahler’s historic hut like a temporary fold. What will unfold is a twenty-minute sound dialogue: an electric violin, connected to effect units, will meet the metal sculpture and the acoustics of the forest—technology and nature, resonance and interference will be negotiated in real time.

Tony Wagner’s performance understands listening as a pro-active practice of establishing a relationship: sounds are not only produced, but they can also be experienced as relations between body, material, space, and surroundings. The audience is invited to inscribe itself in this field of action—not only as passive listeners but also as participants in a process in which the lines between inside and outside, between work of art and environment are redrawn and shifted time and again.

In the sense of 2025’s Mahler Forum theme The Sound of Listening, listening becomes a political and aesthetic gesture here: it means to become aware of what takes place between things, on the fringes, on the thresholds. The performance allows us to experience that listening is not only perception, but also relation—a form of orientation in a space whose topology constantly shifts. In this way, Clusterfuck Experimental Sound Performance for Electric Violin by Tony Wagner with Schmale Bottle in an Afterhour Setting by Wally Salner becomes the soundtrack of a place where mathematics, sculpture, history, and the present, human and non-human enter into a shared and open field of listening.”