Until 1995 there were three – three young people from Switzerland, who, circulating in various scenes between Vienna and Zurich, produced sound, staged room installations and made pictures. They were concerned about fusing their personal signatures. In 1995, Martin Hodel was killed in an accident in the mountains but did not, however, disappear from the group identity.

The works in the evn collection come from the months prior to this fatal event. At that time, Martin Hodel, Eric Schumacher and Andrea Clavadetscher were sending sheets of paper to each other, re-working them – using various techniques from stamp printing to sketching with ballpoint pen – and passing them on. The rules were those of free improvisation, there was never a set programme – digital music montage transferred to paper.

Thus, these communal works are concerned with non-verbal processes of communication between artists who, even when they were living in various places, nevertheless wanted to develop a collective sensitivity and methods of production. What comes out from under the veils and opaque layers of colour and disappears again gives the impression of being fragile and enigmatic, and refers to the iconography of popular culture as much as pantheistic mythologies and fragments of memory from childhood – a kind of visual “world beat”.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)