Our universe consists mostly of dark and unperceivable materia. This performance is a door to enter this world. The visual source material for Materia Nigra are about 25.000 scans in high resolution of 16mm ‘chemograms’ that Jürgen Reble produced in the past. These ‘chemograms’ are made by unique alchemical transformations of the film material itself. The editing of the image streams will happen live on the computer. It is a visual expedition into cristallized salts and dyes wich are changing rhythm and structure constantly between moving images. Inside the chemical elements of the film appears the bizarre richness and beauty of its materiality.

In his music, Thomas Köner always moved towards the borders of perception, as if it was a means of communication with the beyond. The quadrophonic staging of Materia Nigra expands the performance space, where the horizontal flow of time meets with the sonic impulse and creates a vertical dimension, in which premonition, memory and splinters of Here and Now become perceptible as the darkening of the observed Materia.