Farbwechsel – en passant (Colour Change – en passant)

With his Colour Change – en passant, Otmar Sattel developed a game that involves colour and movement. Motor-operated awnings in bold single colours were installed in eight niches on the underside of a section of railway line. The result is a sequence of different coloured areas in black, green, beige, red, orange, yellow, blue and anthracite.
A screen-printing process was used to apply QR codes to four of the coloured areas. The QR codes can also be found on small plates below the awning construction. Encoded in them is Hans (Jean) Arp’s 1924 poem Opus Null (Opus Zero) – an early, associative poem consisting of four verses. Otmar Sattel’s work refers, on the one hand, to Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s geometric designs and on the other, to the Constellations developed by Jean Arp, which follow the principle of randomness.

Otmar Sattel born 1953 in Speyer, Rhineland-Palatinate, lives and works in Berlin