La Sculpture Verticale en Brique et Bandes Magnétiques (vertical brick and magnetic tape sculpture, 1984), by Sarkis (b. 1938, Istanbul) consists in a stack of thirty-six red bricks made of eighteen levels, between which disordered magnetic tape issues forth in large quantities. Six, twelve, eighteen and thirty-six are recurring numbers in the artist’s oeuvre, who often uses evocative symbolic materials to create a work that functions as a vessel for memory, whether it be autobiographical, historical or cultural. Here, the recording of a Zwölftonspiel (twelve-tone piece) – an experimental music piece created in numerous versions by one of the inventors of twelve-tone music, Josef Matthias Hauer (b. 1883, Wiener Neustadt – d. 1959, Vienna). The exhibition focused on German and Austrian composers of the turn of the 20th century, such as Richard Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg or Anton Webern. There, the magnetic tapes played the role of a carrier of memory. No longer legible, the recorded compositions remain silent, yet alive in the body of the sculpture like the blood that runs through our body, inaudible from the outside. Sarkis creates mute monuments of silence, in which musical presence may only be imagined.