An Unbeatable Combination

Creating works of art takes more than just creativity. Artists also have to find the right materials to make their ideas a reality. Thanks to two different silicones from WACKER, Lena Policzka was able to do just that for her art installation entitled “System: Circuit” at City Hall in Murnau, Germany.

Her installation “System: Circuit” has been hanging in the council chamber of Murnau City Hall since early September, and that has special meaning for artist Lena Policzka. Not just because she lives right around the corner in the village of Unterammergau, but because Murnau, a town of 12,000 people in Upper Bavaria, has left a major mark on art history – despite its small size. Painters Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, who lived together as a couple for many years, worked there, as did other members of Der Blaue Reiter, or The Blue Rider, a movement prior to WWI that served as critical inspiration for Expressionism.

To this day, the citizens of Murnau feel a strong affinity for the fine arts, and so in 2019 they called for proposals for a redesign of the council chamber at City Hall – a competition that Policzka won. The 33-year-old artist did not limit herself to just decorating the walls, but instead devised a complete concept for the space.

“I felt strongly about using more than just individual chamber walls as my canvas – I wanted to tie in the whole space,” says Policzka, who creates installations and sculptures. Her idea was to create a diagram representing a living discussion – one that, in a metaphorical sense, tells a story about what goes on in the chamber. “I see the municipal council as a river delta fed by citizens’ concerns. I also liked the image of a mental switchboard – a communication network with neurons and synapses. Neural pathways take information and direct it to nerve cells where it’s bundled and analyzed, and ultimately used for making decisions,” she says.

The work also needed to incorporate aspects of the landscape, which, in Murnau, is dominated by the waters of Lake Staffelsee, the moorlands and mountain chains – a panorama that the town’s painters made famous as “The Blue Land.”

To make all of that a reality, the artist quickly realized that the best way for her to express her idea was to translate it into a tapestry of tubes and connectors filled with flowing colors. Her work contains several hundred of these nodes and brackets and roughly a kilometer of tubing.

The network runs along the walls of the entire chamber, encompassing its full perimeter. The entrance to the chamber serves as both the beginning and the end of this loop – the point, in other words, where citizens’ concerns enter the discussion and where decisions exit. But what materials would work for the installation? How do you make the most effective use of colors and shapes? What is actually doable? And how? “What I especially wanted was to give the impression of water flowing in the tubes. But at the same time, I also wanted to incorporate the colors of the landscape,” Policzka points out.

Filling the tubes with real liquid was not an option, however: “Pigments break down in liquids. In the end, a restorer friend of mine suggested working with silicone gels,” she explains. Policzka turned to SILGEL^® 612, a pourable, addition-curing, two-part RTV silicone rubber compound from WACKER. The major advantage of this silicone is that it – along with the pigments it contains – cures to form a crystal-clear material as soon as the starting materials have been mixed. Silicone is also UV resistant, which keeps it from aging or yellowing. For the artist, the tiny, entrapped air bubbles that manufacturers do their very best to prevent in industrial applications were perfect, creating the illusion of flowing water.

The experts at Siltec created their own formulation for the tubes, using WACKER silicone as the base material. “That’s why it’s important to know exactly what properties the customer needs,” he added. “It’s the only way to pick the ideal silicone so that we can then optimize the blend with the right additives.”

The same goes for the extruder parameters – pressure, temperature, speed, processing window – which have to be set just right for the subsequent extrusion step, because these will determine the ultimate product properties. “The biggest challenge for us was to take the desired artistic qualities and translate them into quantitative, technical parameters,” he recalls.