Raul Walch (born 1980 in Frankfurt am Main) lives and works in Berlin. Beyond the boundaries of conventional arts, he works as a concept artist and takes on the role of a performer or researcher in his works. The focus is always on the unconventional artistic confrontation with social reality. Often the audience becomes an integral part of his performances. His works and playful actions are often ephemeral interventions that are peculiar to the place where they are happening. Context and everyday politics provide the raw material for Raul Walch’s social sculptures.

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For the work ‘Spherical Semaphores (Geneva)’ for the biennial ‘(re)connecting.earth (02) - Beyond Water’, Raul Walch selected four boats to reuse their old sails, paint them and let the boats sail on the Lake Geneva. The new sails must provide a different feel for the wind – for the sailors – as well as a new visual perspective on the lake – for the spectators viewing from the shore. The reuse of fabrics is in the centre of Walch’s work, which is both about bringing natural elements into focus and showing how reusing textiles can enlarge objects.

Instead of directly painting the sails of the sailing boats, which often sail far away from the inner fjord and would therefore have been hardly visible to the residents of Kiel and the visitors to the exhibition, Walch again reused textiles to make a mobile, which is hanged in the entrance of the Stadtgalerie Kiel.