Die Glocke, 2026

The word “Glocke” moves from naming a functional object to naming a form; once form becomes the main meaning, the word multiplies across domains such as tools, domestic objects, clothing, and bodies. Historically, Glocke appears as glocka / clocca in Old High German and later as glocke in Middle High German, and it is commonly explained as an imitative borrowing connected to Old Irish cloc(c), taken over together with the object in the context of Irish missionary activity. In its early life, it was not simply “a bell,” but a communal instrument that organizes social life: it marks time, calls people together, warns, and participates in church and ritual contexts, and it can also signal animals, as with bells worn by cows and sheep in the Alps. Then a semantic shift occurs and Glocke no longer names only a thing, but a silhouette. A telling example is glockenrok, already attested in the fifteenth century, where the word clearly operates as a description of form. From there, the sound object becomes a shape template that migrates into other domains, from butter cloches and cheese domes to cake covers, bell-shaped skirts, bellflowers, and even body slang. Language repeats the form and produces a whole family of meanings that are linked by appearance rather than by function.

In my intervention you can find different blue-colored “Glocke” objects, and you are invited to change their placement. In this way, similar to language itself, the installation can shift, reorganize, and reproduce itself through repeated use and small variations.

(Return to Projects)