Walter and Jan Verwoert
Voice Pieces – Wo soll das Lachen übernachten? / Where shall laughter spend the night? 

Walter and Jan Verwoert’s new edition Voice Pieces — Wo soll das Lachen übernachten? pairs a seven-inch record featuring six pieces of sound poetry with facsimiles of corresponding typographic inventions by Walter Verwoert used as scores for the recordings. Collaged from found material — letters sliced from local adverts and daily newspapers with a compass cutter — Walter’s two-dimensional language-based artworks are arranged across long scrolls of paper in a calmly factual, yet free and playful manner, much like the stencilled marks of a player piano roll.

The six resulting recordings see Walter perform in a surprisingly wide range of approaches: full-bodied singing transforms into the repetitive enunciations of letters, syllables and sounds to suddenly paint concise pictures with words using layered language and existential humour.

Experiencing the record with Walter’s facsimile collages in hand synthesises an experience of listening and viewing that provokes acts of interpretation in the audience. What noises, notes or words would you use to perform each score?

Each of the six pieces in this edition have been carefully selected from a larger series of recordings that Walter and his son Jan produced over a year-long period – as they met monthly so that the former could take a break from battling old age and illness – in an experiment to give voice to typographical compositions.

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Walter Verwoert was born in 1935 and lives in Geilenkirchen. He learned to be a typesetter after the war before going to art school in his hometown of Düsseldorf in 1959, where he studied with Joseph Beuys. In 1965 he graduated as a Meisterschüler in sculpture. Walter participated in the Fluxus scene in Düsseldorf and Aachen with his particular blend of performance and sculpture, and continued his practice throughout decades of teaching evening classes at the experimental school project Lernort Studio in Düsseldorf, holding regular exhibitions in the region. His love for setting type resurfaced in recent years, which resulted in an extensive body of ‘typographical compositions’, six of which are reproduced in the edition Voice Pieces — Wo soll das Lachen übernachten?, which has been printed in a limited edition of 100 copies.

Jan Verwoert was born in Geilenkirchen in 1972, and is a writer and a musician. He lives in Berlin and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute MFA in Rotterdam and at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where until summer 2024 he shared a studio with the artist Tris Vonna-Michell. Verwoert and Vonna-Michell frequently taught together in Oslo and decided to produce the edition Voice Pieces — Wo soll das Lachen übernachten? with Walter while closely conceptualising its overall design with Nienke Terpsma.

Edited by Jan Verwoert and Tris Vonna-Michell.

Designed by Nienke Terpsma.

Archival box containing a seven-inch vinyl record, a series of fascimile concertina prints by Walter Verwoert and a book with an essay by Jan Verwoert.

Printed by Offsetdruckerei, Pliezhausen, Lithography by max-color, Berlin. Vinyl pressed by R.A.N.D. MUZIK, Leipzig.

Walter and Jan Verwoert ‘Voice Pieces – Wo soll das Lachen übernachten? ’ is co-published with Badisher Kunstverein and Mount Analogue.

ISBN: 978-1-910516-31-7

Artist’s edition printed in a limited run of 100 copies.

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All orders can be made by emailing: mail@slimvolume.org

UK: £40 plus £3 post and packing
Mainland Europe: £40 plus £6 post and packing
Rest of the World: £40 plus £15 post and packing

Limited Signed Copies:

UK: £80 plus £3 post and packing
Mainland Europe: £80 plus £6 post and packing
Rest of the World: £80 plus £15 post and packing