Stefan Hunold leads the material. Dragi Djeric follows the movement and decides when a work has found its sound. The plaster dries fast — a condition chosen on purpose. It leaves no room for deliberation and none for correction. Whatever happens, happens once.

The practice came from two directions. Dragi Djeric trained in graphic design, space and new media in Basel, worked in scenography, and spent years in Berlin as a creative director, a role that is not about making the thing but about knowing when it is finished. Stefan Hunold took over his parents‘ lime plaster manufactory while studying law and became a specialist in the material itself: its recipes, its behaviour, how long it stays open and the moment it closes.

The two roles in the studio are the two biographies. He knows what the material will do. She decides when it is right.

Since 2018 they have worked on it together, since 2021 under the name Djeric–Hunold. In 2025 they left Berlin for the canton of Bern — not for a studio to visit, but for a place where the practice is lived.

Black is not a colour here. It is a condition, the only surface on which a movement of a few seconds stays visible for years. From across a room the works read as a single plane. Coming closer, that plane separates. It changes again with the hour, the position, the angle of the light. The works hold no fixed image; they open through the room around them and through the presence of someone standing in it.

The line that runs through many of the works is not cut. It is raised. The material is guided until it gathers into a ridge, and then it is left. The decision is not where to begin. It is when to stop.

The reference is not painting. It is ballet: years of training so that one movement can be carried once, in front of people, without correction, and look as though it cost nothing. And it is music — a single tone held long enough that its overtones become audible. The titles have said so from the beginning. Etüde. Duet in Black. Rehearsal. Symphony. The room the works are shown in is called the Musicroom.

A dancer’s movement exists only while it happens. The plaster keeps it.

I Sat With Black is Dragi Djeric’s writing. It is made the same way the panels are. She sits with a finished work and writes without stopping — pages of it. Then she takes out the three or four sentences that hold, and the rest goes. Mixing the material is the writing. The single movement is what is left.

Those pages exist as works in their own right: the Recordings, in charcoal and graphite on paper, where the writing stays legible as a trace rather than as a message. The texts do not explain the panels. They are made by the same procedure, in another material.

The same question runs through the commissions. A room is not a surface waiting to be covered. It already has light, proportion, a direction people move through it. The work begins by finding out how a place already sees, and the answer is sometimes a wall, sometimes an object.

The practice has been opening, in format and in material. Some works now take a whole wall and are carried by a single movement. Others stay small and are polished until the lime throws the light back. For the first time, parts of the surface are left un-troweled, so that several blacks meet inside one panel. What is one plane from a distance becomes many up close.