Gerhard Marx / A Geometry of Echoes / 2015

Goodman Gallery Cape Town 17 December 2015 – 27 January 2016

A Geometry of Echoes is a line that Gaston Bachelard uses to explain how inhabited space does not necessarily ascribe to the dimensions of physical architecture, and therefore can ‘transcend geometric space’. A similar logic is at work in South African land surveyor, Henry Fourcade’s invention of photogrammetry ; a method in which stereoscopic photography is used to open a third, dimensional space as a means to define topography. When, in 1904 Fourcade used photographs to draw his remarkably accurate topographical map of Devil’s Peak, he was accessing the heights and depths of the mountain, but not by climbing it – he was accessing it through the flat surfaces of photography.

When an echo bounces off a wall, the ephemerality of a sound is reflected off the solidity and geometry of a physical environment, a voice physically meets context, defining the space between sender and surroundings. ‘Sounding’, the practice of using sound to measure depth in a body of water, utilizes the echo, by bouncing sound off against the seabed and ‘catching’ it, as it returns to the sender. The water is measured without physically entering it, yet the unit of calibration used to define the depths in water necessarily involves the body – measured in feet or fathom, nomenclature plunges the body into the depths even if only symbolically. The body is implied even where the body cannot go.