Seek You
premises of moonhorn promises

To accompany my exhibition Moonhorn at Hotel Maria Kapel, I have made a publication to give a body to my research behind the moonhorns.

Moonhorns are late Bronze Age objects, dating back to around 1300-600 BCE. They have been found in frequent numbers on the north side of the Alps, across Switzerland, into France, and in the south of Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Yet nobody knows why they were made or what they could have been. They are ghosts of an ancient past, aliens in the places they were made, and visitors from another time. These objects emerge as mysteries in our day and age.

Seek You is a two-part publication. You is a library of images. Seek is the documentation of conversations.

In an attempt to reconstitute the moonhorn language, I held different conversations with people. In them we constructed moonhorns, moonhorns made entirely of words, a terrestrial moonhorn, a sonic moonhorn, a cosmic moonhorn. I spoke to Erika Berdelis, a Swiss specialist of Bronze Age ceramics and moonhorn replica making, about the material connection of moonhorns to this earth. I talked to Raquel Jiménez Pasalodos, a Spanish music archaeologist invested in the material remnants of music we will never get to hear, about the magic of tracing the marks of sounds on physical objects. And I spoke to Jan van Muijlwijk, a Dutch radio enthusiast specialised in moonbouncing, about seeking connections beyond this earth and the simple importance of reaching out.

Its title 'Seek You' is a term borrowed from the world of Earth-Moon-Earth communication. When moonbouncers attempt to connect with someone by sending radio signals via the moon back to earth, they use the Morse code letters CQ, reading out loud “Seek You.” For me, this embodies the universal longing for connection, the search for meaning, purpose, past, future, and everything in between: “You is all there ever is to seek.”

The publication is available directly through Jesse Presse.

2025

Type: Soft Cover

Edition: 100

Pages; p. 40 / p. 256

Dimension: 13.5 x 21cm / 5 x 5cm

Language: English

Author: Leonie Brandner

Graphic: Elisa Piazzi

Printer: K Print
Publisher: self published
Proofreader: Georgie Brinkman

Supported by:

het Cultuurfonds