formalhaut

is founded by Gabriela Seifert and Götz Stöckmann in Frankfurt/Main, Germany*. We study strategies that challenge the relation of anthropological and universal space in various architectural and artistic media. 

We seek the variety of concepts, favor coincidence more than determination. We examine the dichotomy of mass and void, analogous to the scientific enigma in the dual properties of light, we search for beauty at spatial borders and spatial rims, as in vessels. 

Long since, we exhibited live cattles in transparent boxes on a Hess paddock when coincidentally one of the biggest environmental MCA’s happened in 1986, later we positioned a large urban chess move called double knight game quoting Bobby Fischer’s strategy against the backdrop of Frankfurt’s growing skyline. Currently we build a Vessel of Peace on the 38° parallel in South Korea with Don Mee Choi’s poetry along the vessel’s rim that is telling of migrating birds: „Similes for Snow Geese“

In 1999 our living-room project started. As time passes, it generates a built ensemble in the medieval town of Gelnhausen, where its osmotic architecture negates the usual distinctions between interior and exterior, public and private. The work is integral to the location as well as  autonomous, just like Thomas Kling’s poem that adorns the facade wordily stating: “the house is the mouth cave“.

In 2007 we embarked on the dimdiary project, a photographic logbook recording man’s traces in the natural and geometrical environment of the Australian continent. In what was long assumed terra incognita we seek the rare presence of what might be one of the oldest human civilizations juxtaposed with recent urban and industrial manifestations that chose progress over sustainability. Nocturnal photography is used to express humility, while simultaneously evoking the Universal Expanse to display a parallel imaging that approximates the subtle beauty of the earthly as it borders on the sublime. 

* with Ottmar Hörl until 1996