Luis Maria Sulzmann, Untitled, at Ping Pong, Copenhagen

“Untitled” by Luis Maria Sulzmann, at Ping Pong, Copenhagen, 02/10/2025–10/10/2025.

What happens when our gaze drops to the height of a rat? When architecture ceases to be our privileged domain and instead becomes an animal labyrinth, narrow, porous, constraining? We asked ourselves this, thinking of Kafka, as we stepped into the space transformed by Luis Maria Sulzmann, where the protagonist has no face, only a tail. Where there is no centre, only gaps.

A passage came to mind from Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, where the narrator, perhaps also a mouse, describes a life lived “between burrowings, flights and silences.” Sulzmann doesn’t cite Kafka, but he speaks the same language of burrows. He invites us to slip into what remains unsaid, to lower ourselves, physically and perceptually, into a twilight zone where the logic of visibility begins to fray. The exhibition has no title, perhaps because a title would get in the way, too smooth a surface to climb.

The space at Ping Pong, already semi-subterranean, is bisected by a translucent membrane, a plastic sheet that divides, veils, distorts. Transparency here is deceptive, it lets light and shadows through, but imposes detours. To enter, we have to narrow ourselves, squeeze into the tight corridor that initiates the sequence of rooms. We are no longer distant viewers, but bodies navigating space, like the nocturnal guest described in the exhibition text, caught on infrared camera, cunning, agile, unseen.

These works aren’t simply “looked at”, they are uncovered. A black tube juts out from the wall like a disarmed cannon, and inside, a pale blue glow reveals the perfect silhouette of a rat standing upright. Projected onto a wall, the image becomes a signal, an urban bat-signal, but animal, clandestine. It’s a shadow animated by light and memory, a trace of a living presence that once inhabited the space.

Further on, an acoustic horn, or perhaps an industrial siren, emerges from the wall. Instead of sound, it emits a tuft of brown fur, as if the animal had taken shelter there or curled up inside it. A speaker of silence, a mouth closed off by a presence.

Sulzmann works with humble materials: tubes, plastic, fur, cardboard. And yet what he constructs is anything but humble. This is a parallel architecture, a scenography of disappearance. Each element performs a double function: object and route, obstacle and passage, presence and projection. A white pipe pierces the wall like something out of a drainage system or a hamster maze. Its coarse materiality points to a movement already made, invisible but inscribed in space. This is a show we don’t just see, we overhear it, whispered in the dark.

The lighting is minimal, sharp, focused. No ambient sound, no wall texts. The atmosphere is that of a nocturnal experiment, we feel ourselves under observation, but also somehow observed. The hierarchy between human and non-human dissolves. The rat, animal of the gap, becomes architect. The artist, both witness and accomplice.

We found ourselves lingering in front of the rat projection longer than expected. Not to inspect its details, but to let ourselves be seen by it. The silence in the room was thick with waiting, as if something might emerge at any moment, from a pipe, a crack, the wall itself.

On our way out, we glanced back at the tunnel we had entered through. It was the same, and yet it had changed. As it always does, when we’ve truly stepped into another point of view.

Luis Maria Sulzmann doesn’t tell a story. He lets us sniff it out, we might say. We must approach carefully, follow the breadcrumbs, listen for the muffled sounds beneath the surface.
Make ourselves small. Get a little lost.
Then surface again, perhaps.