Kush Yard Totem, Octavian Graphic Score 3 42

The sound accompanying the artwork is available by clicking on the player above.

Eight strange columns made of coloured plastic buckets form a circle in the middle of a meadow on the Campus Westend at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. “Kush Yard Totem. Octavian Graphic Score 3” is the companion to two further works that Satch Hoyt has installed in Bad Homburg and Eschborn for Blickachsen 12. Starting from the octave as the primordial law of harmony, the colours of the eight totems, each with 14 elements, form unfixed graphic scores of sound associations, which can be read both horizontally and vertically. “Their rhythm, indicated by wind factor, echoes the sounds that eternally circumnavigate the cosmos of the Transnational African Diaspora and the African continent”, explains Hoyt. The four mono-black columns in Frankfurt are set against the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ architecture of the IG-Farben building, and its dark history. “Kush”, by contrast, the ancient Egyptian term for Ethiopia, the cradle of mankind, refers to the provenance of a sound recording of nomadic people chanting and drawing water, which inspired Hoyt to create this polysemous installation: “The simple yet complex quotidian act prompted me to dream of a utopian state, a harmonious zone where we could all exist.”