Inspired by the extensive archives of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, the custodian of the museum and the adjacent Goethe-Haus, and their manuscripts, drafts, first editions, prints and drawings collected over the past hundred years, obsidian captures the artist's wandering gaze as discoverer and creator, creating something unseen from an overflowing cornucopia of sources.

Seidel's pictorial worlds set in motion oscillate between gestural handwriting, delicate calligraphy and impetuous figurines. As media chimeras, they build bridges between the spiritual world of analogue romanticism and the thoroughly optimised, digital modern age. While our accelerated everyday life in the frenzy of gadgets offers fewer and fewer poles of tranquillity, in the scriptural film sculptures the most diverse strands of time, dimensions and perspectives intersect without regard for Euclidean space or physical boundaries. By means of dramatic deceleration and deliberate leaps of thought, the work creates a contemplative zone and offers the viewer an abstract haven of calm akin to nature.

The large-scale projection weaves the new museum building in ephemeral layers of memory for its opening in September 2021. Supported by artificial fog and specially composed music by Oval (Markus Popp) and opera singer Stine Marie Fischer, obsidian unfolded a crystalline network of associations that brought the sublime and intangible back into the urban sensory world - far away from the thundering echoes of information and traffic flows...

The premiere of the work was cancelled on the opening day of Luminale 2020 due to the COVID19 pandemic. In 2021, the work could be presented to a large audience for the festive opening of the German Romantic Museum from 11 - 14 September 2021.