Fritjof Mangerich is interested in the »absence« embodied by the objects around us. He is drawn to the ghostliness lingering behind, inside, underneath things. He seeks ways to feel and listen to the stored traces of what has been and what remains in a given place, ways to sense the atmospheres and voices of »tuned« space.

This interest was acutely manifest in his architectural intervention of 2016, eine andere Stimme (a different voice), in a temporarily vacant house in Braunschweig. Much like Rachel Whiteread, who in her groundbreaking sculpture Ghost (1990) »mummified« the interior of a house slated for demolition, Mangerich probed and preserved the essence, the being, of the one- or two- family house.

Using five large funnel-shaped sculptures mounted in the windows of five rooms, he conveyed the air, the atmosphere, the intangibility of space to the outside in the form of soundwaves. These he generated by means of the archetypal acoustic test: in each of the five selected rooms, he clapped loudly and clearly with his hands, recording the sound event in real time and then playing back the preserved sound electronically. In the meeting of the impulse and the impulse response of the space, the characteristics of the various rooms became perceptible. 

Like an organism, the structure expressed itself, exposing its interior to the outside world. This solidification of sound, as it were, prompted Mangerich to compare his sound-based sculptural process with filling a negative mould with sculptural material, one of the oldest methods of shaping there is. Through this process, the artist got to know the uninhabited house, as he said himself. He brought the hollow and yet filled, silent and yet speaking rooms of an erstwhile dwelling place into dialogue with both the immediate surroundings and the viewer.