Live-Set together with HUUUM

ABADIR is considered one of the most renowned producers in the Arab region. The Egyptian producer, DJ and music journalist creates kaleidoscopic, imaginary worlds. His originary tracks oscillate between grand compositional gesture, cinematic opulence within a narrative framework, and impactful contemporary club sound. With albums released on the Shanghai-based cult label SVBKVLT, ABADIR is catapulting us into different regions, time zones and realities.

Commissioned Work: ABADIR & HUUUM - »Of Many Worlds«

Unsafe+Sounds is proud to present this years’ commissioned work by three exceptional artists, who are involved in world-building via sonic means and stimulating the imaginary in our present times. „Of Many Worlds“ sees Egyptian producer and DJ ABADIR come together with HUUUM for the first time, an Iranian composer-duo formed by Vienna based musician Rojin Sharafi and singer and multi-instrumentalist Omid Darvish. Both acts are embedding cultural artefacts and traditional styles of their respective regions and beyond in their contemporary club sound. In fusing heterogenous elements from different backgrounds, they’re offering a multi-perspective approach, a many-sided story that opposes ethnonationalist narratives.
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Composition

»Utilt Mono« (2024)

"»Utilt Mono« was composed for the 10th anniversary of the Black Page Orchestra, an ensemble I have a deep connection with and have been member of since day one. The Black Page Orchestra expressed a rich variety of musical aesthetics and styles in its first decades and is committed to keep on with this tradition in the future. My work tries to reflect that committment with a fluid and rather eclectic array of musical ideas. The piece puts together a series of contrasting and constantly moving musical gestures and blends together the acoustical instruments and the electronics in a schizophrenic fashion. All this musical gestures, touching various genres, create a sound haywire - a musical tilt."

About the composer

Milan-born Alessandro Baticci works at the interception of music and technology. As a composer, flautist and electroacoustic performer, Alessandro is active internationally in the field of contemporary music and sound art. Alessandro is also serial entrepreneur, inventor and product designer. He developed various electro-acoustical instruments, digital control and mapping systems, sound libraries, as well as sound and ergonomic solutions for acoustic instruments. Alessandro holds lectures and workshops in various universities across the world. He pursued studies in composition, flute, sound engineering as well as multimedia art in Milan, Vienna and Graz.

Alessandro is a Luzern Festival Academy Alumnus, fellow of Akademie Musiktheater heute by the Deutsche Bank Stiftung and Fellow of the Bogliasco Foundation (2022). His work has been rewarded with prestigious awards, such as the Staats-Stipendium of the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport (2021), the Publicity Award of the SKE Cultural Sponsorship (2022), the Theodor Körner Prize (2022) and the ERSTE Bank Composition Award (2023). Alessandro is founding member of The Black Page Orchestra, as well as co-founder of the composer-performer duo Nimikry. His recent compositions include commissions for Lucerne Festival, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Staatsoper Stuttgart and Ensemble Phace.

Composition

»Talk in Whispers« (2024)

An attempt at illustrating, musically, the little fights that occur when a couple is caring for a baby for the first time. The soft arguments that escalate from whispers to little outbursts and then soften back again, juggling moments that feel claustrophobic, euphoric, confused, and calm, almost all at once.
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About the artist

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Alfredo Ovalles is a versatile pianist and composer who has delved into various musical realms. Drawing from his classical background and his experience performing in rock and pop bands in Caracas, he perceives music as a unified entity, where boundaries blur and insights gained from one genre inform his approach to seemingly unrelated musical settings.

Alfredo is highly sought after as a soloist and chamber musician. He has played concerts with orchestras such as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Polish Baltic Philharmonic in Gdansk, Poland, and the National Symphony Orchestra of the Dominican Republic, among others. He has also performed at prestigious music festivals in Europe, including Wien Modern, Transart Festival in Bolzano, and the Warsaw Autumn Festival.

DJ-set

Antonia XM is a DJ, producer, vocalist, theatre music composer and label curator based in Vienna, Austria. In 2016 Antonia co-founded the label Ashida Park aiming to build an accessible platform for new and unconventional forms of club- and experimental music, visual art and digital dialog. Antonia’s productions and DJ sets range from Hybrid Club and Hard Dance to nostalgic Ambient or Pop, all the way to various hybrid forms of experimental music, Dembow, Rap and more - always building on heavy emotions somewhere in between intimacy and excess. In 2022, Antonia released her debut EP „DEMONS“ which is now followed by her second EP „blurry“ on Ashida Park.

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DJ-set

anxxxious_t is a performer, visual artist and DJ who implements a set of multimedia strategies into her artistic practice.One of the aims of her practice is to broaden artistic creation to a wider audience,making it less exclusive and more accessible. In pursuit of this goal, she utilizes club culture as a powerful tool to challenge the prevailing rules of an elitist society in the art world.She draws from her experiences as a trans woman, weaving them into her music and visual art, while breaking free from rigid artistic categories and genres.By challenging the norms of a conventional perception of the world, she reveals a glimpse of an alternative reality. Her sound can be haunting and intriguing, creating a sense of tension and unease.Other times it's powerful, pulsating electronic beats that enter the body and claim to explore one's own naughty side.

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Live-Set

The introspective musical world that Artjom Astrov carves out, is highly idiosyncratic, and embedded in its own space and time continuum. Situated somewhere between enigmatic stream-of-consciousness, awkward electronics, stubborn concept-music, and eclectic singer-songwriting, the Vienna-based musician is offering a form of alienated, and alienating, sonic lyricism. It’s often his voice – spoken word or rapping – that holds these loose, intimate pieces together.

As Benzokai, rin la or simply as Artjom, he has released several EPs for record labels such as Quantum Natives, Baba Vanga, Plot Toy and Serious Serious, an imprint he himself initiated. Since 2020, together with artists Michaela Kisling and Till Megerle, Artjom Astrov is part of the project “Guiding Light”. It started as a series of videos and later developed into a band practice that can be defined as “deep hanging out” that is neither predetermined nor random.
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DJ-set

Distorted pop samples, electronic hybrids & warming sounds - aua&angst mixes sensitive DJ sets, shifting between Ballroom and Breakbeats, empowering lyrics and femme attitudes. They are part of the queer-feminist Hannover-based collective ‘soft spot’, a platform for experimental, electronic sounds that is supporting queer-feminist politics on and off the dancefloor. Besides its local activism, the group is building on an exchange with other queer-feminist collectives, for example with Chilldo 池糖(Chengdu) and Lokalni Poznańscy Voguerzy (Poznań). Together with DJs anxxxious_t and Madame Léa, aua&angst started organizing KISSEN, a Vienna-based series that aims to place trans, non-binary and queer people at the center.

The closing night of the festival sees the 10 Years anniversary concert of Black Page Orchestra at WUK. Its artistic director, composer and Unsafe+Sounds festival founder Matthias Kranebitter, initiated the musician-composer ensemble in 2014. It was also the starting point for the festival, which has accompanied the journey of the renowned Austrian ensemble ever since. Black Page Orchestra stands for an uncompromising confrontation of the present, our society and established orders. In adventurous arrangements, in which classical instrumentation is expanded to include digital and multimedia forms of expression, they break with entrenched patterns of perception. This year’s programme features compositions by the ensemble members themselves.

Programme

Alessandro Baticci - Utilt Mono (premiere)
Alfredo Ovalles - Talk in Whispers (premiere)
Florian Fennes - Beauteous Psycho Odyssey (premiere)
Igor Gross - Seismograph (premiere)
Matthias Kranebitter - Combative Music And Its Algorithmic Demystification
Mirela Ivicevic - Sidra na Nebu s Dijamantima (Rainbow Hoodie) -commissioned by Black Page Orchestra with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
Mirela Ivicevic - Scarlet Song
Rafal Zalech - Fanfare for the Black Page Orchestra (premiere)

Performed by‍

Alessandro Baticci, flute
Florian Fennes, sax
Samuel Toro Perez, e-guitar
Alfredo Ovalles, piano
Igor Gross, percussion
Kaja Farszky, percussion
Fani Vovoni, violin
Rafal Zalech, viola
Irene Frank, violoncello

DJ-set

Blood of Aza's productions and DJ sets are emotionally intense and resistant. She provides us with the noisiest pop-edits and the most disturbing post-internet tracks of the current SoundCloud underground. The UK artist began to gain prominence by releasing remixes of pop and rap idols. In the meantime even Aphex Twin is featuring her tracks in his sets. Blood of Aza has created a blissful sonic palette for herself, ranging from soothing MIDI lullaby magic and speaker-blowing club edits, to hell-raising ambient soundscapes.

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DJ-set

DJ Diamond is an event manager, promoter, DJ and member of the Fast & Nice crew in Vienna, Austria. Her sets are informed by the hardcore continuum. In her energetic,, high-on-dopamine sets, she is fusing oldschool gabber tracks with Hardcore anthems and Neo-Trance gems.

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DJ-set

DJ GÄP is a producer and DJ from Slovakia who is known for his pleasure-driven demolition of boundaries between mainstream and underground. In fusing iconic contemporary pop tracks with experimental club music, he is offering a wild mix of bootlegs and pop-edits that question elitism and narrow stylistic canons, and instead celebrate diversity. His DJ-Sets are likewise playful, based on global rhythms, and with a soft spot for bouncy bass.

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DJ-set

DJ Hybris is known for skillfully blending a diverse range of genres including House, UK Bass, Techno and Jungle. He has been active in Austria's club scene as DJ and promoter since over a decade, initiating the club series “Non Redundance” in Salzburg that is aiming to provide a space where the music can be as diverse as the crowd enjoying it. He is co-founder of Vienna's “Euphoria” an event-series that has been gaining attention in the club scene, focusing on 90ies UK-rave vibes and music.

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DJ-set

DJ LOSER is a Thessaloniki-based music producer and DJ who is expertly exploring the sound of 'meta-rave’, focusing on the evolutionary layers of contemporary club music,  blending and moving around styles without limitations. With an array of collaborations and releases over the past decade, he has established the label “Magdalena’s Apathy” - providing a space for younger, up-and-coming talents like xato, and DJ Saliva, alongside figureheads such as Brodinski, Safety Trance and Julien Andreas. For the past three years, he has been a resident at Stegi.Radio, presenting an array of contemporary monthly mixes. As a multi-level sound explorer under the moniker “Angel’s Corpse”, he embraces pseudo-spiritual aspects of the virtual and the less club-driven side of musical experimentation. His output has been featured on labels such as Forbidden Planet Records, Puppy Tapes, Herrensauna,  and VEYL.

DJ-set

DJ Lucy Bacchanal’s sets are a chaotic carnival where Afrobrazilian pride clashes with anarchopunk rebellion. She throws a handful of genres and identities into a blender, hits turbo, and unleashes a sonic storm. Her set will leave you sweaty, horny and ready to start a revolution.

DJ-set

Paul Ebhart is an artist, musician, DJ, and above all a passionate music collector based in Vienna. Djing since his teenage years the alias „Dj Ebhardy" is all about the drive that manifests in different styles of dance music - not defined by genre boundaries but much more by an invisible veil of attitude and revolt.

DJ-set

Daphne Xanthopoulou is a Barcelona-based sound artist and designer who explores listening as a speculative strategy of care, where technology is used to repair our sense of kinship with the material world.  Her music has been released on labels including Paralaxe Editions, tssstapes, Exiles, with her albums receiving acclaim from The Quietus, A Closer Listen, Bandcamp Daily (2021 2024). Her collaborative and solo installation work has been showcased at festivals like Sónar(2024), Ars Electronica(2021). In addition to her sound work, she has published essays, poetry and fiction on imprints such as Urbild Editions, Teflon, aglimpseof.net

Live-Set

Over the past two decades, Dorian Concept has successfully carved out a niche for himself. The virtuoso keyboard & synth player and multi-instrumentalist layers dazzling melodies to colorful, fascinatingly polyphonic tracks. With releases out on Ninja Tune and Brainfeeder, he presents dense arrangements that can get even orchestral in their complexity, while his improvising skills tell about an affiliation for jazz. Dorian Concept's latest track ‘Hide’ went viral. It was to become the official soundtrack to the Dark Fantasy trend online, covered hundreds of times by fans worldwide. For the festival opening Dorian Concept will present a special live set.

DJ-set

From the heart of Asunción, Paraguay to the vibrant streets of Vienna, Austria, ephemer is a DJ, producer, and promoter. In their electrifying DJ-sets ephemer is merging the worlds of reggaeton, guaracha, (hyper)pop, trance, global bass music, noise, and metal that promise the unexpected. The multifaceted artist is co-founder of Underworld and the @millenialpuzzled event series, and member of bands like Telebrains, Atom Womb, and Fuzzkrank. Dive into Ephemer’s universe, where every set is a story, every beat a memory, and every performance a journey into the unknown!

DJ-set

esti.d presents Unserious+Sounds. 

Confronted day2day with a world not made for fags like her, esti.d found love in a hopeless place (the gay club). Living and breathing pop culture, chronically online and with great taste in bad taste. Mashing sounds, genres, and ideas to form a new incredibly annoying form of music. 

Deeply unserious in his approach to art but not in their political work. Creating new spaces for misfits with their peers at Ärger and HYPERTRASH, she is now an integral part of Vienna’s alternative queer nightlife. 

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Live-Set with Mariam Rezaei

Evicshen is the pseudonym of San Francisco-based sound artist, performer and inventor Victoria Shen. In her artistic practice, she explores the spatiality and physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music uses analogue modular synthesizers, vinyl, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews the conventions of harmony and rhythm in favour of extreme textures and gestural sounds. Shen is the inventor of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable needles that allow her to play up to five tracks of a record simultaneously.

The programme is presented by Ventil Records.

Live-Set

Edgy in her turn to romanticism: FRANKIE is offering surreal ballads for the contemporary subject. Somnambul and haunted, intimate and vulnerable - her naked Sirene voice is counteracted by vocal processing, while empathetic cello loops are charged with glitches and noises, bursting from the subconscious. An emotionally heavy therapy session, oscillating between reality and artifice. Classically trained musician, and dancer, artist, researcher, and actress Franziska Aigner is working as a performance artist for Anne Imhof since 2012. She is part of the Holly Herndon vocal ensemble, has completed her PhD in philosophy, and is starring in the upcoming feature by Austin Jack Lynch.

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Composition
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»Beauteous Psycho Odyssey« (2024)
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»Beauteous Psycho Odyssey« is a tribute to the energetic and virtuos performances of the Black Page Orchestra and was composed specifically for the performing musicians, also featuring them throughout the piece. It highlights the rockband attitude of the ensemble and draws inspiration from Frank Zappa to John Zorn and Mike Patton. The tape - a frequent element in the repertoire of the Black Page Orchestra - is replaced by electronic effects, thus preserving the chamber music character of the ensemble while simultaneously advancing its transformation into a rock band."

About the composer

Florian Fennes was born in Vienna, Austria, where he studied jazz saxophone and classical clarinet at the University for Music and Performing Arts. He performs in a wide spectrum of musical styles, including jazz, rock, pop, classical, and contemporary music. He has collaborated with various big bands, such as Nouvelle Cuisine and the Christoph Cech Jazz Orchestra Project, as well as international pop acts like Waldeck and I-Wolf, and national acts like the saxophone quartet Phoen, the swing band The Stompin' Lickers, and the Dominican singer Jose Ritmo. Florian is also a member of the German jazz-metal band Panzerballett and the contemporary ensemble Black Page Orchestra, with which he has played numerous concerts all over Europe.

His eclectic musical taste and desire for challenge drive him to continually search for new ways of musical expression, always pushing the limits. This attitude is perfectly matched with the music of Panzerballett and the Black Page Orchestra.

Hybrid-Set with Yajaira La Beyaca

Colombian producer, composer, and curator Carlos Quebrada, known as Genosidra is one of the heads of Argentina's electronic music underground. With his latest release he's weaving Puya, Chandé, Venezuelan Tambora, Merengue, Bambuco, and Son together, distorting them into a distinctive sound world. Digital tools serve him to amplify the ferocity of folkloric beats. Succeeding in enhancing the raw essence of Latinx music, Genosidra is releasing with the iconic Buenos Aires based Hiedrah Club de Baile platform. For Unsafe+Sounds Genosidra will perform a hybrid set together with Yajaira La Beyaca.

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Live-Set together with ABADIR
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Rojin Sharafi and Omid Darvish bring the past, present and future together in enigmatic tales that transgress club-aesthetics with folkloristic elements. As HUUUM, the two Vienna based Iranian composers interweave musical elements and instrumental sounds from the Persian musical tradition with advanced electronics to create an expressive form of magical folk-futurism.

Commissioned Work: ABADIR & HUUUM - »Of Many Worlds«

Unsafe+Sounds is proud to present this years’ commissioned work by three exceptional artists, who are involved in world-building via sonic means and stimulating the imaginary in our present times. „Of Many Worlds“ sees Egyptian producer and DJ ABADIR come together with HUUUM for the first time, an Iranian composer-duo formed by Vienna based musician Rojin Sharafi and singer and multi-instrumentalist Omid Darvish. Both acts are embedding cultural artefacts and traditional styles of their respective regions and beyond in their contemporary club sound. In fusing heterogenous elements from different backgrounds, they’re offering a multi-perspective approach, a many-sided story that opposes ethnonationalist narratives.

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Live-Set

In the Anthropocene, only memories - triggered by odours, sensations or sounds - tell of an intact world. HYGNA is an immersive Dark Metal séance of powerful miniatures built from drum computers and sharp-edged guitar riffs to trace demonic voices from afar. At the Unsafe+Sounds Festival, HYGNA will present their first Vinyl-release.

Live-Set

Iceboy Violet is one of the key figures of the UK's contemporary rap scene. Space Africa, Blackhaine, Loraine James, or aya - the list of their collaborators is long and testifies to their musical versatility. Iceboy Violet's tracks are merging emotive, autotuned vocals with raw experimental club textures, ranging from drill to post-grime, tinges of warped pop, and sprays of ambient. Their lyrics offer a radical, abstract form of subjectivity - vulnerable, yet uncompromising -, providing a counter-narrative to the hyper-masculinity of the hip-hop scene. Their live-performance is confrontational, searching for personal and collective catharsis.

Iceboy Violet is presented in cooperation with Struma+Iodine.

Composition

»Seismograph« (2024)

A piece for Gran Cassa standing in the centre and 4 soloists with subwoofers, positioned to bracket the audience. The rhythmic and dynamic basic material was generated from the strongest recorded earthquakes. Earthquakes are measurable vibrations of the earth's body. According to an analysis of more than 35,000 natural disaster events by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), a total of 2.23 million people worldwide lost their lives in earthquakes between 1900 and 2015.

About the composer

Igor Gross started as a classical percussionist with a lot of collaborations in all the main Austrian Orchesters (Wiener Philharmoniker, Wiener Staatsopernorchester, Radio Sinfonie Orchester Wien, Tonkünstler Niederösterreich,…).  During his studies at the Musikuniversität Wien (Konzertfach Klassisches Schlagwerk), he more and more developed his primary interests: contemporary music, electronic music, free improvised music, composing and working with composers, and especially using the vibraphone as his own electronic sound machine. He started playing with the main Ensembles for contemporary music, as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Phase, Ensemble 20. Jahrhundert, Ensemble Platypus, and is founder member of the Black Page Orchestra,… .

His ambition to work with contemporary composers has made him a specialist in implementing the composers ideas on his instruments. In the last years he has continuously expanded his repertoire of sounds on the vibraphone and various percussive instruments, that he combines with different electronic devises. He is very fond of the Idea that music can develop and transform, as life does in the process of fermentation. Besides theater productions in VOLKSTHEATER Wien and he was  teaching percussion at the MS Perchtoldsdorf for 11 Years and has given lectures. It is one of his primary interests to always keep on searching for a new or different way to realize ideas and sounds in music.

DJ-set

Inou Ki Endo’s preference lies in infernal and cerebral sounds, obscure dilettantes and professional borderliners beyond the musical mainstream. Shilla Strelka curates Unsafe+Sounds Festival, hosts concerts in Vienna as Struma+Iodine, is part of the Elevate Festival team of curators and active as a music journalist for various magazines. As Inou Ki Endo, she is filtering communal sounds and rhythms from the past and the present, drawing from experimental, hybrid, harsh, rhythmic, and ambient sounds from around the globe.

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Live-Set

Kasho Chualan is a Kurdish-Canadian pianist, composer and sound artist currently based in Vienna. Chualan’s approach is textural and narrative. She is creating dreamlike scenarios, manipulating the social constructs of how an instrument should be played, or perceived. Her compositions and performances are inspired by her Kurdish roots. They are consisting of raw sounds, intuitive experimental improvisation, acoustic or percussive prepared instruments, keyboard, tape and whatever other intriguing toy she happens to stumble upon.

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Multi-channel performance

Leonie Strecker is a German composer and sound-artist, based in Vienna. Stretched between the two poles of concrete and synthetic music, her work is exploring ideas around the hybridity of form, presence and absence, and the connection of memory and experience. Her multi-channel performance “Terminal” shows her as a performer who uses her voice as a navigational tool to spatialize sounds in an environment. The fact that her voice exerts control while staying inaudible seems to explore issues of power, control, and self-determination.

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DJ-set

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MARAws is a curator, promoter, writer, DJ and musician who is currently based in Vienna, Austria. She is co-organizing the event series Augend&Addend + co-running the cassette label Jeopardize. Furthermore, she is a curatorial assistant at Struma+Iodine and Unsafe+Sounds Festival as well as part of various other music and cultural projects. 

For U+S Festival 2024 she will play an early morning hours ambient set.

Live-AV-set

"The post-human reality isn’t all glistening dystopias and cyberpunk fantasies. It’s walking empty Shibuya backstreets with neon lights advertising to nobody, or molten plastic-sediment stones littering the shoreline at a Kanagawa eco-trance rave"

MIRA新伝統 is an AV-art project. The duo consists of electronic musician Raphael Leray and performer Honami Higuchi. Their work juggle with theory-fiction, video, soundtrack & performance art to knit narratives and rituals around the problematics of Anthropocene, otherness, and posthumanity. Their latest EP “Noumenal Eggs” was released on Subtext Recordings (Berlin).

DJ-set

Maksym Uvarov aka MKCMLLN is a Ukrainian DJ, sound producer and a host of Oxygene at Res Radio in Vienna. Hailing from Kyiv’s vibrant nightlife he carries the gene of its unconditional uniqueness. Deeply inspired by the classics of 90s house, techno and trance MKCMLLN always delivers the captivating sound, blissful and euphoric either vinyl or digital.

MKCMLLN will play a b2b set with Tucibi.

Live-Set with Evicshen

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist and performer. She is known for her groundbreaking compositions on turntables with her high-speed mixing style and atmospheric depth confusing the listener in a pleasurable way. Her live-sets seem chaotic, but are following a clear vision, a narrative that is also showcasing Rezaei’s astonishing ability to use the turntables to transform sound. It’s precise, highly concentrated sound collages that push the boundaries between noise, jazz and ambient, evocating a non-linear approach to time that brings the haunted memory of the past and the immediacy of the present together.

The programme is presented by Ventil Records.
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DJ-set

Margo Dubovska aka Marshrutka is an Ukrainian artist, DJ, and co-curator of the Kriegsbilder event series, based in Vienna. Weaving emotional narratives that often reflect her personal experiences, her sets are genre-fluid, eclectic, aggressive and dramatic.

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Composition

»Combative Music And Its Algorithmic Demystification« (2021)

The piece starts in the present and finishes in a not so distant future. All forces of human mankind are united, even the most athletic ones on the planet, for the final combat against enslavement by machines. Will humanity be able to tame the algorithm before it eats the world? You won’t believe what happens next!
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About the Artist

Vienna-born composer, and musician Matthias Kranebitter is founder of the ensemble Black Page Orchestra as well as one of the initiators of UNSAFE+SOUNDS FESTIVAL.

Kranebitter studied electro-acoustic composition with Dieter Kaufmann and German Toro-Perez, film and media composition with Klaus-Peter Sattler and piano with Christiane Karajeva at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He continued his studies with a postgraduate course at the Conservatory van Amsterdam as well as at the University of Graz with Alexander Stankovski and Beat Furrer.

His music is characterized by aspects of our media society, a dense accumulation and mash-up from everyday life’s sounds to a flittering-colourful and hyper-heterogenic sound flood, a comic-like, grotesque distortion of clichéd musical gestures with an ironic ambivalence, aiming for a culture-liberated Art brut in music.

His works received awards such as 1st Prize Gustav Mahler Composition Competition 2006, the 1st Prize Project Young Composers Gaudeamus Music Week Amsterdam 2009 or the Impuls Composition Competition Graz 2013, Publicity Prize of the SKE Austro Mechana 2013 and the Förderungspreis of the City of Vienna 2014. Collaborations with Ensemble such as Nadar Ensemble Belgium, Decoder Ensemble Hamburg, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Phace, RSO Vienna, Ensemble Mosaik Berlin or Talea Ensemble New York.
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Live

Mira Mann works transdisciplinary in the fields of poetry, music and performance. She deals with sex, illness, motherhood and violence in a radically personal way. In this context, she makes common role clichés and social attributions resonate. She creates connections between actors from a wide range of genres and consciously crosses the boundaries of so-called high- and subculture.

Mira Mann's curatorial and artistic practice explores the boundaries of closed systems and searches for unexpected feedback loops. Together with Daniela Schroll, she has been organizing the workshop and concert series “Intimacy Quarterly” at the Blitz Club and the Habibi Kiosk of Kammerspiele Munich since 2022. Here she presents powerful positions of contemporary experimental pop music and creates space in the workshop format to make them available as community practice. 

Mira Mann lives and works in Vienna and Munich.

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Composition

Sidra na Nebu s Dijamantima (Rainbow Hoodie)

for Ensemble and Electronics (2024)

The happiest song for the non-existent girl who went searching for celestial diamonds. May her absence fill the world with screams that won‘t wane until the new world is born soaked in love and compassion.

commissioned by Black Page Orchestra with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation

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About the Composer

Unrestricted, energetic, explosive – Mirela Ivičević is one of the most enthralling composers of her generation. Her works are performed at international festivals and interpreted by well-respected ensembles such as Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Nikel.A number of her pieces were developed with the close collaboration of The Black Page Orchestra, a heterogeneous ensemblewhich she helped to establish in 2014. Ivičević was born in Split, Croatia in 1980. She studied composition with Željko Brkanović, Klaus-Peter Sattler and Beat Furrer.Is it possible for the senses to produce resonances amongst themselves? Is it possible to acoustically represent that which is remembered and experienced and:how much abstraction does such a translation need and how much can it tolerate if it is to lead us intothe realm of the imagination?

The composer Mirela Ivičević transforms sensual and emotional, as well as political and social impressions into haunting and suggestive works.She has no qualms with the processing of personal experiences, on the contrary – her oeuvre and biography are closely intertwined.She writes herself into her pieces, staking her place. Ivičević is not concerned with a simple translation of her experiences.Her approach is much more emotional, sensual and immediate.She extends her experiences into a sound so as to become a discovery, an invention.At the same time, what is narrated always remains in limbo. In a critical examination of society, but also of her own emotional world, Ivičević enters into historical, intimate or semi-fictional realms. What preoccupies her are the micro- and macro-political questions. Many of her works revolve around self-empowerment she herself has experienced. They tell of relationships, of sexuality and pregnancy, but also of powerlessness, of war and destruction. They demand independence and freedom, a space free of ideologies and power dynamics.This occurs not only on a conceptual but also on an acoustic level. Dominant orders, hegemonic relationships, are suspect to Ivičević, no matter in which context. It is a matter of rebelling against them, of going against borders, taboos and fixed meanings.As a result, she is not a composer of shy notes. Her music roars, it rears up, it shrieks and falls away, it curses and moans.

Hyperactive structures and high densities run towards ecstatic outbursts, an acoustic inferno, a great stroke of liberation. Tense and anarchic, Ivičević's compositions resemble rebellious acts.

Live-Set

Currently living in London, Austrian-Ethiopian sound artist, harpist and composer Miriam Adefris is an active part of a musical scene that is forming between jazz, experimental electronics and club sounds. Adefris regularly performs with musicians such as Shabaka Hutchings, Valentina Magaletti, or Floating Points. As a solo musician, she develops impressionistic, immersive atmospheres that are reminiscent of Alice Coltrane's Afrofuturistic soundscapes and draw on the artist's East African musical heritage. Its aetheral beauty even led FKA Twigs to invite her to perform at her private birthday party this year.

Live-Set

Mopcut is an international trio formed by experimental vocalist and electronic musician Audrey Chen, Lukas Koenig, one of Europe’s most renowned percussionists, and French guitar-eccentric Julien Deprez. All three come from a jazz background, but their ability to improvise defies any genre limitations. Their energy driven, raging numbers oscillate between unleashed free expression and tamed, tight noise. Structured around ecstatic micro-explosions, they resemble an imaginary form of communication.

Live-Set

Morast is the solo-project of Viennese artist and musician Moritz Morast, who is exploring the melting continuum of noise, deconstructed rhythms and free musical forms. Coming from a background as a designer of musical electronics and his activities in the Viennese free-improv-scene, Morast combines approaches from Avantgarde-electronics with the immediacy and unpredictability of hardcore improvisation. His live- performances are an intense and cathartic spectacle, guiding the listener through dense layers of noise, and introspective ambiences, cut up by shattering percussion and heavy metal distortion.

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Live-Set

Morning Seance is the moniker of Italian artist and musician Simone Borghi. The combination of continuous variation and intricate, repeating patterns that lack a clear beginning or end, build the foundation for his elaborated synth-compositions. Avoiding mechanical combinations and obvious rhythms, the result is a rich amalgamation of textures and harmonies that continuously evolve, taking the listener on an atmospheric journey through diverse sonic environments.

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DJ-set

James Habineza aka Oblate is a DJ devoted to stringing sonic narratives. Collecting sounds from lived experience, he feeds back found energies and intensities into a selection of music with emotional weight. Heavy rhythms help to build and sometimes break these multifaceted narratives.

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DJ-set

Olgica began her artistic career in Serbia as a contemporary dancer and performer, also mastering Serbian folk dance. Now residing in Graz, Austria, she has channeled her deep-rooted dance expertise into a DJ practice moves between the diverse, percussive varieties of broken beats. Her sets are polyrhythmic, and playful, featuring beat patterns from around the globe. Olgica's influence extends through her work as a promoter of the Interlude events in Graz, enriching the city's cultural fabric.

DJ-set

Olorr's passion for fast and tribal-infused music blossomed in his hometown of Graz, where his involvement in organizing events and podcasts shaped his musical perspective and artistic vision. This transformative journey led him to co-establish Wiener Gerüstbau with Ehrenschwesta in 2020. Upon arriving in Vienna, Olorr swiftly made his mark, securing regular gigs and captivating audiences at esteemed venues like Grelle Forelle and PRST. His remarkable ability to connect with diverse crowds and infuse each location with his unique groove speaks volumes about his versatility and skill as a DJ. From Berlin to Stockholm and beyond, Olorr consistently impresses with his captivating performances.

In his DJ sets, Olorr skillfully blends highly effective, old-school influenced techno cuts with contemporary interpretations. Fearlessly incorporating his extensive and diverse musicselection, he effortlessly traverses different styles, evoking rare emotions in the process.

Recently, Olorr has shifted his focus towards his private life following the dissolution of his collective. However, his passion for music remains undiminished. Enter Schwabo, Olorr'salter ego, embarking on a transformative quest that intertwines art, graphics, and music into an ongoing artistic odyssey. Drawing inspiration from the vibrant American underground scene and fueled by the pulsating energy of the UK's electrifying music culture, Schwabo constructs exhilarating sonic landscapes that defy conventional boundaries. With a multifaceted approach, he deftly navigates immersive soundscapes, embracing the essenceof underground culture while transcending the constraints of genre.

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Composition

»Fanfare for the Black Page Orchestra« (2024)

"»Fanfare for the Black Page Orchestra« is my heartfelt tribute to the ensemble. This piece is meticulously crafted to highlight the unique talents and virtuosity of each member. It captures their dynamic improvisational skills and celebrates their joyous spontaneity. The composition is short, energetic, and powerfully expressive, reflecting the vibrant spirit of the Black Page Orchestra."

About the artist

Rafal Zalech’s artistic activities are widely spread between performance, composition and development of IoT devices for musicians. As a violist he played on most renewed new music festivals on 5 continents, many solo appearances with orchestras such as Webern Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, Divertimento. A member of The Black Page Orchestra, Duo collective Nimikry and a CEO of a Smart-Instruments Startup DigitAize. Between 2010-2021 Zalech intensively worked with one of the most recognised Ensembles for New Music – Klangforum Wien with which he played over 100 concerts. In 2022 Zalech received the prestigious Erste Bank Kompositionspreis for his lifetime artistic achievements.

Zalech’s scientific work focuses on research on the electronic support of classical acoustic instruments and their use in the artistic field. Both in training and working with new music ensembles in the context of concert, theatre and opera projects, Rafał Zalech strives to combine compositions and interpretations, classical and other musical styles. In doing so, he consciously relies on the internal musical discourse in composition and sound, and in his works, he develops his own way of communicating with the audience beyond the usual sonicity and structures.

Rafał Zalech is a scholarship holder of, among others Ministry of Culture in Austria, J. Windisch scholarship, The Thyll-Dürr Foundation, Mica Austria and a member of the «Sylff» program of the Tokyo Foundation. In 2017, Zalech received a scholarship from the Austrian Federal Chancellery (Arts and Culture) for outstanding graduates of art universities throughout Austria. In 2022 Zalech received the prestigious Erste Bank Komposition Preis for his lifetime artistic achievements.

Live-Set

The sounds of German-Syrian producer and renowned mastering engineer Rashad Becker open an imaginary space. Interested in the sonic creation of a fictional species, including its traditional dances and songs, Becker uses his modular synthesiser to create sounding entities that enter into communication with each other. They talk, they sing, they fight, they interact and let us enter a sphere where every creature, no matter which space it inhabits, has equal rights to exist. It’s sonic fiction par excellence.

Live-Set

Oscillating between haunted ambient drones and harsh noise tremor, post-industrial delirium and tender melodic sketches, Ladakh based musician and artist Ruhail Qaisar explores the confines of memory, the eerie swarms of the human unconscious. He is incorporating vernacular concepts, poetic gestures, and improvisational chaos in highly evocative sonic sceneries. Based on real-life events and local mythos, his recollections of the Indian-Himalayan region whose majority’s population is tribal, his sound palette speaks of fear, anger, and alienation that condenses into a poetic, lyrical form of power electronics, a chronicle of personal and generational trauma.

DJ-set

S.verin is a Vienna-based DJ and member of Funkroom, a DJ and party collective specialising in electro and leftfield genres. S.verin started spinning vinyl almost two decades ago - his sets are accordingly flawless. His elaborate selection is characterised by breaky grooves and deep basslines, chilled vocals and catchy melodies.

same is a Vienna-based musician working with formulaic layers of remembered sounds, asymmetrical trip-hop, and strict guitar sounds, scrutinizing aesthetics classified by platform capitalism: Leftfield beats for club arbitrations, consisting of coded samples and unstable algorithmic rhythms. same also writes about music, promotes, and djs under the same name.

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Live-Set*

Wukir Suryadi feat. Xhabarabot (Xhabarabot Voice Machines are digital interfaces that generate the synthetic voice of Rully Shabara which can be used to perform improvisation live.)

SENYAWA - X is a special set that presents Senyawa in a different version, as a collaboration between the organic and the synthetic. A set that can be performed without the presence of Rully Shabara and/or Wukir Suryadi. Senyawa X establishes a direct connection between human interaction, the raw materials of nature, and the digital world. It prompts reflection on humanity’s role within nature and our digital extensions; a tangible expression of how we amplify our natural abilities using technology.

The Indonesian duo Senyawa enjoy cult status among their dedicated fan base. Situated somewhere between psychedelic rock, doom metal, free improvisation and ceremonial ritual, Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi transcend the common concert experience with their music. Suryadi uses self-made traditional instruments, above all the sound of the bambuwakir, an Indonesian stringed instrument, to create their mystical sound. Shabara’s shamanistic voice on the other hand is covering various expressions, from metal growling to painfully beautiful singing.


*Rully Shabara: I deeply regret to inform you that despite submitting all necessary documents and meeting every requirement for my Schengen visa application, I have been unable to secure the visa. After waiting for almost a month with my passport held at the embassy, I was unable to apply for other essential visas during this time. This delay forced me to miss a scheduled performance in Hong Kong and undergo the process of reapplying for a UK visa, leaving no adequate time to make another attempt at obtaining a Schengen visa.

DJ-set

Enter the high-NRG world of Venezuelan producer Safety Trance aka Cardopusher ! Luis Garban, friend and collaborator of artists like Arca or Rosalía, is influenced by 90s rave culture and socialized in the underground clubs of his hometown Caracas. In his iconoclastic sets he is fusing rattling reggaeton with euphoric trance, Latin popsongs with oldschool hardcore anthems, and subversive breakcore tracks. They are embracing noise-driven disruptions and juggling raw energies to create an anarchic form of Latincore.

Live-Set

Tehran-based Ata Ebtekar aka Sote is a pivotal figure of the electronic music scene in the Middle East. The Iranian artist, composer, and producer weaves expansive sonic tales that reflect on the sociopolitical and sociocultural situation in his country. Applying electro-acoustic techniques, maximalist sound design, microtonal systems, and brutalist vibrational polyrhythms, Sote is exploring abstract sounds to comment on the society he's living in. His recent release on SVBKVLT is an attempt to process the immense amount of frustration, anger, helplessness, and fear he is facing, given Iran’s sociopolitical condition. It's a dark, melodic, and noise-driven contemplation on corruption, oppression and murder.
With “Persepolis”, his latest release he is referring to the historical Persian Empire, altering musical codes from their original tonality and rhythmic tradition to achieve synthetic, futurist hardcore tracks.

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Live-Set

Susu Laroche - an anagram of Chaos Lure Us - is a multidisciplinary artist and musician of Egyptian-French descent. Resembling a spiritualist séance, Laroche's musical performance is built from magickal, Dabke-inspired rhythms, droning post-psychedelic sounds and ritual singing. Lyrical references to Sci-Fi author Ursula K. Le Guin and the poetry of 19th century occultists serve as a contextual framework for her mystical universe - a hypnotizing, intermediate zone, fallen out of time and space.

Live-Set

THE NARRATOR is a multidisciplinary visual and immersive experience artist, vocalist, producer and writer exploring the healing power of sensory storytelling which delivers emotionally charged interactive experiences.

THE NARRATOR transcends time, social barriers and boundaries through sound, poetry, and movement. She believes that the duality, vibrancy and uniqueness of the human imagination is connected to the freedom found in storytelling. Sonicbooks are her surrealistic, artistic experimental audiobooks that cocoon listeners in fictional worlds woven together by music, soundscapes and poetic narratives.

Motivated by the power of the collective voice, THE NARRATOR is also found performing with London based artist collective/label life is beautiful redefining performance and live experience.

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Live-Set

The Paris based producer Talita Otović and her label collective Explity Music break with the male dominance in hardcore techno. Her releases build narratives from different sources, and are influenced by genres like gabber or trance, by rave anthems, as well as video games O.S.Ts, and spoken word ballads. Her live sets are both emotionally captivating, and physically affecting, setting free cathartic energies that have you cry on the dancefloor.

DJ-set

tonedeaf, the alias of Vienna-based designer, curator, and organizer Marlene Kager, fka bossschnuffi, represents a new project aimed at narrating and bridging various sonic spheres. The term "tone-deaf" often describes someone who is ignorant or indifferent to social nuances, in this context it serves to precisely address and work against this issue. In Austria, where many individuals live in relative oblivion, it is imperative to foster and rekindle connections both with our peers and within ourselves. The concept of connectivity on a sonic level can be traced back to ancient spiritual rituals, forming a fundamental aspect of human existence. This auditory connection continues to underpin numerous religious practices globally to this day. By rethinking and elaborating on these concepts, we can adapt them to serve our own collective interests. Reforming, recontextualizing, and rearranging sonic narratives constitute the core of tonedeaf's practice.

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DJ-set

Polyrhythmic finks, broken beats and atmospheric textures - based out of Graz, Austria, Toupaz has been quietly carving out his own lane in the leftfield techno & bass music world. Distinct, detailed and fundamentally genre-fluid, his oddball productions cross a range of stylistic influences and tempos, purpose built for the explorative DJ. If you’ve kept your ear to the ground these past few years you might have come across his outstanding transmissions as Awo Ojiji which landed on well-respected labels like Eclipse Tribez and Control Freak.

The magic in the Toupaz sound lies in the way he manipulates drums, using non-standard palettes of percussion and making them move in mind-bending ways. The wild rhythmic displays are matched by a virtuoso approach to synthesis and sound design which ducks, dives and darts around the many-limbed beats. It’s not a simple case of studio shock and awe, though — Timo understands how to maintain subtlety and intrigue even in the most complex, fizzing peaks of his tracks. In short: playful tracks with physical impact.

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DJ-set

The artist, producer and DJ Büsra Arli aka Tucibi is active in the Viennese underground since the 2020s. Her DJ-sets feature mesmerizing Techno and hypnotic, but minimal Acid tracks, often shifting over to Hardcore, House, and Trance.

Tucibi will play b2b with MKCMLLN.

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Live

With a background in playing jazz and formative years of playing saxophone in a live band, Prague-based Ursula Sereghy stepped out of the hustle to focus, all while becoming a regular at the local Synth Library Prague. A space where she found the support of the musically and politically like-minded and could nourish her newfound passion for experimenting with machines and exploring the limitless possibilities of sound design. Ursula Sereghy's sound pieces challenge the listener to a different mode of perception, undoubtedly following its own internal logic yet making perfect sense.

Live-Set

Sonic warfare, rage, trauma, grief – the intensity of Van Boom’s sonic palette is abyssal. Van Boom is the figurehead of Kuwait's musical underground scene. With releases out on Cease 2 Exist the producer is rebelling against the prevailing social and cultural repression of the wealthy Gulf state. His harsh sounds and hyper-industrial high-BPM rhythms, which renounce the notorious 4-to-the-floor beat, channel anger and resistance and offer a valve for frustrations.

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DJ-set

xato is the moniker of the Greek, Vienna-based artist, producer and audio engineer Ioannis Nafpliotis. With a diverse palette of sounds, he debuted in 2020 with “State of Dismay”, an ambient/drone EP released on Himera’s boutique collective, “GoodbyeForever”. Entering 2024, he released a club essential EP "Emotional Burner" on DJ Loser's label “Magdalena’s Apathy”, featuring Atlanta's finest 645AR, his anticipated drone EP "Irrational Fear" via "evo-natura", featuring bod [包家巷] and the catastrophic bass / leftfield EP "Stories with no fairy tales" via "xyx", featuring Klahrk. His work involves sound synthesis and manipulative resampling from personal sound design sessions and field recordings, fusing club, hip-hop & avant-garde elements. xato is the owner of the avant-garde concept label “evo-natura” and electronic club collective “xyx”.

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Hybrid-Set with Genosidra

Yajaira La Beyaca is a cross-dressing artist from Venezuela whose identity is constantly reshaped. Her dramatic drag-performance crystallizes this shapeshifting artistic practice that is aiming to represent migrant, Black, and queer people of all backgrounds. Yajaira refuses to be confined to a material body and is committed to express radical freedom in catalizing the artist's deepest thoughts and addressing our dark collective subconsciousness. For Unsafe+Sounds Yajaira La Beyaca will perform a hybrid set together with Genosidra.

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Live-Set

Yuko Araki, a Tokyo-based multi-instrumentalist and composer, explores a wide range of musical possibilities in her work. In her solo project, Araki, who was socialized with hardcore and metal music, works with modular synthesizers to create abstract rhythms and dissonant harmonies and skillfully integrate elements of noise drone and industrial music into her compositions. Thus Araki creates unique soundscapes that are characterised by heavy and dense sounds that are feeding into the legacy of Japanese noise artists.

The programme is presented by Ventil Records.

DJ-set

মm. (read: mwo, just like the bangla alphabet) is an independent DJ, curator and community organizer based in Dhaka & Vienna. Their sets are percussion-driven, featuring genres, styles and rhythms from the global South and its diasporas, with intentions to trace collaborative music histories across the larger region. Their DJ sets and performances are heavily inspired by diasporic movements, memories, and hybridities, and aim to center the bodily joys of racialized queers and femmes on the dance-floor. The style of music they play, they like to call it “south-on-south”, and they try to embed it in movements of club & dance influences from all over the world to reclaim the phenomenon of dance music from euro-american imaginations. 

They are founding members of the Dhaka-based karkhana collective and Vienna-based Spice Mixers. They are also involved in curatorial work for Struma+Iodine and Unsafe+Sounds.

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Performance

»As I laid down my heart and discovered the depths of my lungs«

Dancing the line between laughter and sorrow, love and rage, the characters embrace both the beauty and the raw edges of what it means to care for each other.

“I care for you

not always for myself 

I am a care body 

I care care care

I have always carried care

will always carry care 

I am a care body”‍

‍laughing at each other’s vulnerabilities and strengths, the rotation of the ribcage, where the heart is in the middle, lungs following and expanding. Essential elements of life that operate in unison yet often struggle against each other.

Through their dynamic foreplay, friends become lovers, and lovers become something even more profound. Diving into the pulse of punk and the messy celebration of embodied clownesque resistance. 

Fragility as a source of strength, and roughness as a path to deeper understanding. The performers invite the audience to laugh with them, to cry with them, and to experience the full spectrum of emotions that come with being a carebody. 

“You Are My One and Only” 

This is a performance for anyone who has ever felt the push and pull of being in connection with (an)other.This is a night for those who dare to feel deeply, enjoy a good slap, still cling to teenage fantasies and embrace to be “the fool”.

About the artists
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Anna Schall is a Vienna-based visual artist who studies at the Department of Performance Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Schall focuses on performance, costume, voice and stage design for theater, music stages, club spaces and non-stages of all kinds. Their work stems from a queer-feminist position, looking for brave spaces inside and outside of the body. Their most recent work includes commissions for performances at Schwankhalle Bremen, Britney X Festival Köln, Donaufestival Krems and Volksbühne Berlin.

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Hannah Wimmer is a contemporary dancer and choreographer. Currently dancing between London, Vienna, and Altmünster. She began her professional training at the St. Pölten Ballet Conservatory and continued in New York, focusing on contemporary dance. Hannah recently finished her MA in Expanded dance practice at London Contemporary Dance School. In her own research, she focuses on feminist politics, queer theory, and related body and identity issues,which can be addressed in both the physical and digital landscapes, and is constantly inspired by collaborating with different artists.

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Tony Wagner is a musician and artist whose work builds on the conception of immersive ambiences for introspective listening and experiencing. Their solo and ensemble pieces explore the wide ranges of sound and emotionality with an experimental approach, while keeping the cathartic and transformative capacities of pop music close to heart. Tony’s work spans from productions under the aliases Tony Renaissance and Bogland to collaborative works with the duo Snake Boots and the collective Transformative Narratives, to commissions for film, theater, dance and performance pieces and to his work as co-manager and event organizer within the music label Tender Matter.

Credits
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Concept, choreography & performance: Anna Schall & Hannah Wimmer 
Sound : Tony Wagner
Costume: Anna Schall / Costume assistance: Luise Nehl
Photo: Negin Rezaie/Rosa Knecht
Outside Eye: Veza Fernandez, Chiara Mila Jason

Sound-Lecture-Performance
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»An Expansive Cyclical Praxis: Reflections | Reverberations | Re-Evaluations…«

Dr Hannah Catherine Jones will present a lecture-performance exploring their praxis mapping the various worlds they inhabit, occupy, and create as an artist-musician-researcher-broadcaster-writer-composer-conductor-founder-educator; a disrupter, a destabiliser of the status quo, a (dis)organiser of multiple collectives, community, events, broadcasts…  To Unsafe Sound’s thematic call “Of Many Worlds”, Dr Jones will respond polyphonically, polyvocally, discursively, diegetically,  performatively, personally, utilising voice (words and song), synthesisers, sounds, loops, images and moving images in a non-linear multifaceted offering, in real time and space.

About the artist

The praxis of Hannah Catherine Jones aka foxymoron - London-based, award-winning artist, composer, Oxford-scholar, musician, BBC & NTS broadcaster, conductor and ensemble-founder - is exceptionally broad, yet connected by a central spine of decolonisation. Each intertwined strand of creative output is asking: how can we destabilise, disrupt and dismantle the status quo? Jones’ multifaceted work is crystalized in her afrofuturist, predominantly improvised sonic rituals that often feature vocals in Zulu and a theremin. It is directly linked to the question of how diasporic folx utilise vibrations-frequencies-sound-music as part of individual and collective healing practices.

Lecture-Performance
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»Troubled Waters -𝘛𝘜𝘙𝘉𝘖 𝘈𝘵𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨«

In the 0th dimension, Atlantis is a point.

In the 1st dimension, Atlantis is a line.

In the 2nd dimension, Atlantis is a shape (a square).

In the 3rd dimension, Atlantis is a critical tool triggered by the song 'Atlantis' performed by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan, on the B-side of his 1968 album 'Susan on the West Coast Waiting.'In the 4th dimension, it becomes TURBO.

In 9600 BCE Atlantis was destroyed.

Only a few survived. Three former Atlantean citizens have lingered in-between dimensions ever since. "Troubled Waters -TURBO Atlantis is rising" shows their strive and struggle to reintegrate into the Now.
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Vanja Smiljanić is exploring the complex configuration of identity, nationalism, and body politics by engaging with different marginalised movements and practices in her artistic work. In recent years she has been researching the socio-cultural phenomenon of Atlantis, with its grand narratives of Egyptian, Byzantine, and Greco-roman mythology, and multiple histories of centuries- long colonial exploitation and resistance strategies.In her lecture performance, the artist, who identifies herself as a minister of the “Cosmic People” for the countries of Ex-Yugoslavia, Portugal and the former Portuguese colonies and as an Atlantean commissar, invites the audience to participate in her artistic research work, which combines speculative fiction with a critical examination of reality.

‍About the artist‍

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Belgrade-born Vanja Smiljanić is a visual and performance artist living and working between Cologne and Lisbon. Smiljanić’s focus is on interdisciplinary projects and her research lies in cross- methods within the fields of visual arts, video, and performance. In her practice, she often uses the performance-lecture model to bridge fictitious and experiential universes, comprising technical apparatus, diagrams, and sci-fi povera sculptures. Connecting otherwise unparalleled reality systems, Vanja’s work attests to the foundation of ideologies as alienated regimes, recurring to her own body as a vessel for narration, often shifting between the position of oracle and storyteller.

Performance

»Chrysalis«

A body, constantly mutating. A body infested with a variety of materials: mussels, horns, tentacles, synapses, eluding oppression by altering its shape or slipping away from it, and leaving behind only skin. Like a pupated insect about to hatch. In Chrysalis, Yoh Morishita embodies a process of metamorphosis that perceives life as a dynamic equilibrium. Different types of movement appear simultaneously, creating a fatuous coherence of the animated and the inanimate. Existing orders are being dissolved and created anew. If change is the essence of life, how much do we allow ourselves to change? Lithuanian artist/composer Marija Jociūtė creates an electronic soundscape for the piece that inspires communication between all those involved.
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About the artists

‍Yoh Morishita is a Vienna-based choreographer and performer whose practice casually deals with the fusion of Asian and Western cultures in her biography and modern Japanese history. She's interested in the semantic characteristics of dance and conceptualizes it as a gesture, seeking to integrate movement, rhythm, meaning and feeling into a cohesive whole within an ambiguous field where different times and cultures mingle. "Chrysalis" A body, constantly mutating. A body infested with a variety of materials: mussels, horns, tentacles, synapses, eluding oppression by altering its shape or slipping away from it, and leaving behind only skin. Like a pupated insect about to hatch.

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Marija Jociūtė is a Lithuanian artist and musician living in Vienna. Her approach to sound is driven by a curiosity for new correlations between the tangible and the ephemeral truths of our collective perception. Jociūtė is weaving together sounds of synthesizers, pulses of rhythm machines, digital and sometimes found sounds and her voice, to create organically morphing sound pieces that play with the potential of storytelling and redefined meanings.

Kindly supported by brut wien.

Credits

Concept, performance, choreography: Yoh Morishita
Music: Marija Jociūtė
Light design: Leo Kuraitė
Costume: Lisa Knoll
Photo documentation: Sara Piñeros
Video documentation, Trailer: Vik Bayer
Graphic design: Dominik Morishita-Leitner
Outside eye and ear: Camilla Schielin, Julia Müllner, Magdalena Forster, Dominik Morishita-Leitner
Co-production: Yoh Morishita, imagetanz 2024 / brut Wien, im_flieger
supported by: the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, the ImPulsTanz ATLAS program

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Collective Imaginations & Liberations in Club-Worlds
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Participants: Altroy Jerome, Luna Al-Mousli, Lucy Bacchanal, Negin Rezaie
Moderated by মm.
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We have found, over the recent years, that practitioners and audiences of western-european club cultures have become increasingly interested in discourses, trends and representation of global club music cultures. This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of and collaborative exchange among organizers and artists who are also carving their own spaces in local, regional as well as diasporic communities for electronic music and dance cultures that represent their ethnic, linguistic and socio-political realities, histories and legacies. As communities and cultures from the global Majority participate more and more in club discourses to reclaim narratives and critique gazes of western metropoles over racialized cultures, we see them evolve into and create new club-worlds that resist and reform the aesthetic, social and economic rules of western club cultures. Some of these new club-worlds are furthermore queer, both in the traditional as well as the radical sense of challenging us to imagine new, resistant ways of being in the club and on the dance floor.

‍How do these groups come together, and why? What are the ways in which these spaces are carved out - physically, ideologically, socially and aesthetically? What are the challenges that they are met with, especially among diasporic communities based in europe?

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Participants: Martina Brunner (Vienna Club Commission), Meha Jjajharia (Spice Mixers), Mena Huber (Fast&Nice, 4lthangrund, Ponyhof), Samo Zeichen (Unfollow)

Moderated by Elisabeth Falkensteiner

More info in the upcoming week! 

Collective Imaginations & Liberations in Club-Worlds
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Moderated by মm.
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We have found, over the recent years, that practitioners and audiences of western-european club cultures have become increasingly interested in discourses, trends and representation of global club music cultures. This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of and collaborative exchange among organizers and artists who are also carving their own spaces in local, regional as well as diasporic communities for electronic music and dance cultures that represent their ethnic, linguistic and socio-political realities, histories and legacies. As communities and cultures from the global Majority participate more and more in club discourses to reclaim narratives and critique gazes of western metropoles over racialized cultures, we see them evolve into and create new club-worlds that resist and reform the aesthetic, social and economic rules of western club cultures. Some of these new club-worlds are furthermore queer, both in the traditional as well as the radical sense of challenging us to imagine new, resistant ways of being in the club and on the dance floor.

‍How do these groups come together, and why? What are the ways in which these spaces are carved out - physically, ideologically, socially and aesthetically? What are the challenges that they are met with, especially among diasporic communities based in europe?

About Altroy Jerome
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Altroy Jerome is a US DJ/Producer and is known for skillfully fusing deep & soulful Detroit music with a varied selection of gems from around the world. Born in Harlem, New York USA in 1972 and based in Vienna, Austria; he’s played at various events across America, Asia, Europe, The Middle East & Russia to perform his unique mix of deep underground music, which has spawned new inspirations and collaborations in production and performance. He records music under the moniker Altroy and remixes/records for Editions Mego , Pomelo and his own imprint Minimalsoul™. He is the head of MSR Distro vinyl distribution based in Vienna, Austria. Altroy is co-running the club series A Party Called Jack.

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Echoes of Elsewhere? From Archaeoacoustics to Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Lecture)

In this talk Annie Goh traces the figure of echo as a material-semiotic figuration from archaeoacoustics and sonic knowledge production and explore it within the ongoing Sonic Cyberfeminisms project (with Dr Marie Thompson, since 2015). Using examples from acoustic archaeology, Goh re-conceptualises echo as a feminist and decolonial sonic figuration and theorises an aural gnosis to address alternative modalities of knowing through sound and listening. What examples of such a re-conceived echo can one locate in the interrelations of sound, gender, technology of sonic cyberfeminisms?

About Annie Goh

‍Annie Goh is an artist and researcher. Her work, in its numerous forms from sound installation, composition and computer music to writing, performance and social practice, takes a critical approach to contemporary debates in the fields of digital technologies, media arts, generative and computational processes and communication studies, with a particular focus on sound, intersectional feminism, decolonial theory and the politics of knowledge production. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London on archaeoacoustics and sonic knowledge production in 2019, where she was also a Stuart Hall Foundation PhD Fellow. She co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival Berlin 2013-2016 and is co-founder of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project since 2015 with Marie Thompson. She is currently Course Leader of BA Sound Arts at LCC, UAL and a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). She has taught at Central Saint Martins, UAL, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Arts Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin.

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Armen Avanessian in conversation with Julia Grillmayr

Moderated by Shilla Strelka

Armen Avanessian will be joining the discussion online! 

About Armen Avanessian

Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris, as well as literature in Bielefeld. After completing his dissertation, he worked for several years as a freelance journalist, editor and in publishing in Paris and London and from 2007-2014 at the FU Berlin. In 2011 he was a Visiting Fellow at the German Department of Columbia University and in 2012 a Visiting Fellow at the German Department of Yale University. In recent years, he has held several guest professorships and lectureships at various art academies in Nuremberg, Vienna, Basel, Copenhagen, Paris, Hamburg and California (CalArts). He was editor-at-large at MERVE Verlag for several years and organised the weekly theory series ‘Armen Avanessian & Enemies’ at the Volksbühne Berlin. His books have been translated into numerous languages.

Brooklyn J. Pakathi is an independent curator and cultural producer. Their curatorial work is shaped by an interest in decolonial curatorial practices and a search for alternative curatorialstrategies that can be used to embed cultural equity. Brooklyn works in actioning cultures of technology, developing inclusive and alternative definitions of the technological and using virtual space to deploy artistic practice and discourse outside of the modern colonial world system.

»Speculative Listening« (Lecture)

Is the world broken? When something breaks, it emits a sound different from before. That’s why sound is a key means of diagnosing the health of ecosystems.

Indeed, the sounds of our world are changing rapidly; species go extinct along with their calls, cultures disappear along with their songs, icebergs cry, oceans go mute, and even as radio-frequency waves become ubiquitous, entire areas fall silent, stripped of life—yet full of vitality.

This keynote invites you to listen to this silence as an editing mark on the world—the place where two fragments were joined or split apart—and to consider how such silence no longer signals brokenness, but instead stands out as a point of departure, a space where new possibilities can grow, a plot hole that affords the promise of other stories.

About Daphne Xanthopoulou

Daphne Xanthopoulou is a Barcelona-based sound artist and designer who explores listening as a speculative strategy of care, where technology is used to repair our sense of kinship with the material world.  Her music has been released on labels including Paralaxe Editions, tssstapes, Exiles, with her albums receiving acclaim from The Quietus, A Closer Listen, Bandcamp Daily (2021 2024). Her collaborative and solo installation work has been showcased at festivals like Sónar(2024), Ars Electronica(2021). In addition to her sound work, she has published essays, poetry and fiction on imprints such as Urbild Editions, Teflon, aglimpseof.net.

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Latin club music: narrowing old fractures and creating new divides through the diaspora (Keynote)

Latin is a debatable term that encompasses South and Central America and the Caribbean and several cultural practices. But Latin is also a word that often eclipses racial, gender and class intersections. When Bad Bunny sings "ahora todos quieren ser latinos" (everybody wants to be Latin now), in his song "El Apagon", he states with certainty that Latin is trendy, but _what_ kind of Latin does everybody want to be? The Black, favela kid that makes baile funk with his mobile phone in São Paulo? The white, rich Latin person that claims their Latinidad while attending EDM festivals in Europe? The indigenous Bolivian person making hip hop in native language? These are some questions that I've come across whenever I have spoken with Latin American artists in electronic music.

Perpassing class, gender and race, there are three main elements that I judge important to analyze this phenomenon: auralities, sonic territorial technologies and Global South dialogs. Aurality, along with the idea of orality, encompasses a number of embodied forms of listening and knowledge; sonic territorial technologies are a number of devices used to create ephemeral spaces through sound; and Global South dialogs, in this case, relates especially to the new connections entangled by modern music in Latin America.

About Felipe Maia

‍Felipe Maia is a Brazilian journalist, ethnomusicologist, and DJ who covers popular music, digital technologies, and the Global South. He is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Nanterre, researching Brazilian vehicular sound systems known as paredões. He has bylines in several media outlets such as The Guardian, Folha de S. Paulo, Mixmag, Resident Advisor, Pitchfork and others. He is also a resident DJ on Rinse France with BAÏLE, a radio show focused on showcasing baile funk as a club music genre, and curated the NTS album "Funk.BR - São Paulo".

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Sonic Persona Fictions: How to Live with Sound in a Hostile World (Keynote)

Living with sound has the power to transform an everyday persona into a sonic persona. This new persona then lives within a new fiction that may seem idiosyncratic and alien to others: a sonic fiction. But can a fiction be sonic? Not in a world that seems deeply unwilling or even confused when asked to accept the slightest hint of plasticity, generativity, and ambiguity in the way persons of any kind live. On the contrary, even sonic personae within a performance or series of sonic artifacts are expected to present themselves as fossilized and calcified. Too often, even an artistic persona is supposed to remain unaffected.

This talk will first outline how the Afrofuturist concept of sonic fiction, as proposed by Kodwo Eshun, has multiple and substantial relationships to the anthropological concept of the sonic persona (Eshun 1998, Schulze 2018). In a second step, this new hybrid concept of sonic persona fictions allows us to learn how to live with the artistic personae of contemporary and historical musicians, performers, and artists who live with and through sound. How do these sonic personae materialize in and confront their respective hostile worlds? Eshun wrote in More Brilliant than the Sun: "Sonic fiction is an engine of subjectivity." I would add, "Your personal sonic fiction is the sensory real." (Schulze 2018)

About Holger Schulze

Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research moves between a cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. He was visiting professor at the Musashino Art University Tokyo, at the University of New South Wales Sydney, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Currently he works on The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies (with Jennifer Stoever and Michael Bull) and on the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums (with Alcina Cortez, Eric de Visscher and Gabriele Rossi Rognoni). Selected Publications: Sonic Fiction (2021), The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021, ed.), The Sonic Persona (2018), Sound as Popular Culture (2016, co-ed.).

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Sonic Notional Species: Rashad Becker in conversation with Isabella Forciniti (Artisttalk)

Speculative microcosms and sonic identities organized into sounds invite us to engage with a new logic, allowing us to reposition and recenter ourselves within a novel auditory world. The sonic entities we perceive can lead us to the inaudible—sounds that exist but go unheard because of physiological, social, political, or ideological factors, as well as individual tastes and preferences. As we, as listeners, explore new systems of actuality, the creation of fictional sonic species merges with the transformation of the invisible into the audible. Do sonic species contribute to a non-normative narrative?  Is it their lack of formality that, coupled with their disregard for perfection and virtuosity, opens up opportunities for a new speculative logic?

Together with Rashad Becker, we will explore sonic entities, speculative design and the intriguing realm of inaudibility.

About Isabella Forciniti
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Isabella Forciniti, a sound artist from Italy based in Vienna, is deeply entrenched in a diverse range of artistic pursuits, embracing performance, composition, research, and innovation. Her music and live performances traverse the spectrum that stretches from meticulously crafted arrangements to impromptu improvisation. Throughout this artistic journey, she adroitly wields a toolkit of fragmented yet rhythmically captivating beats, intricate manipulations of spatial perceptions, and intriguing psychoacoustic phenomena.

She has been engaged in research projects that intersect the artistic potentials of digital networking (such as The Choir and The Sound System) with the advancement of digital instruments influenced by environmental data (as exemplified by A Sound That Never Was).

Forciniti has showcased at prominent music festivals, including Wien Modern (AT), Skaņu Mežs (LV), Ars Electronica (AT), Unsound Festival (PL), Dark Mofo (AU), and CTM Festival (DE). In 2022 she earned selection for the SHAPE+ platform, a showcase for pioneering music and audiovisual art.

Her academic background encompasses a degree in communication sciences with an emphasis on sociology and multimedia. In 2019, she successfully completed the university program in Computer Music and Electronic Media (ELAK) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She subsequently graduated with a master’s degree in computer music and composition from the Anton Bruckner Private University. Currently, she is laying the groundwork for a Ph.D. in tangible interaction design and industrial sound design.

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»Challenges of World Building – The Norient Perspective» (Moderated Talk)

For 20 years now, Norient and Thomas Burkhalter have been trying to get closer to cultural phenomena and movements in and around music and sound. In this personal presentation, Burkhalter will suggest principles that seem important to him when writing about music, examining it in a documentary film, screening it at the Norient Festival, or exhibiting it. He does not claim that these principles are exhaustive. However, what they do advocate for are: in-depth, long-term and self-aware research; fair collaboration with researchers from different disciplines and with journalists and artists from different places and of different genders and generations; endorsing artists, attacking stereotypical ideas of cultures as fixed entities, showing solidarity with people in war and crisis, and finding ways forward from the challenging demands of identity politics; searching for multimodal formats of representation that open up spaces for complexity and plurality; and consequently trying to create new ways of telling stories to keep reaching new people and audiences—and not handing over the power to define things to big companies and players.

Following the presentation, Jasemin Khaleli will join Thomas Burkhalter to critically engage with his principles and open the discussion to the audience for a larger conversation about methodologies, ethics and principles that affect cultural producers and journalists in projects such as Norient.

About Jasemin Khaleli

Jasemin Anika Khaleli is a Vienna-based ethnomusicologist and artist, currently working within the collaborative project ÆSR Lab – Applied/Experimental Sound Research Laboratoy at the Phonogrammarchiv (ÖAW). Exploring questions of institutionalized violence, archival voids and critical knowledge production, she practices decolonial and queer listening methodologies and sensual ethnography. Her work encompasses different media, such as text, sound and sculpture. With intersectional fieldwork in queer activist techno spaces in Lisbon and municipal housing contexts in Vienna, she was previously a research fellow at Nova University and the Music and Minorities Research Center at mdw.

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Armen Avanessian in conversation with Julia Grillmayr

Moderated by Shilla Strelka

Armen Avanessian will be joining the discussion online! 

About Julia Grillmayr

Julia Grillmayr is a visiting professor of cultural studies at the Art University Linz, Austria (Kunstuniversität Linz). Her key research areas are science fiction cultures and environmental humanities. She holds a PhD inComparative Literature from the University of Vienna and currently writes a book with the working title “Science Fiction Futurologies”. Together with Christina Gruber and Sophia Rut she forms the artistic research collective “Lobau Listening Comprehensions” and, in this context, has been awarded the Theodor Körner Preis 2023.

Julia Grillmayr has worked as a print and radio journalist and contributed, among others, to Augustin, Der Standard (ForschungSpezial) and Ö1 (Radiokolleg,Vom Leben der Natur). She has initiated the radio broadcast “Superscience Me” on the Viennese community radio Orange 94.0. The rest of the time, she spends in muddy danubian wetlands and in tap shoes.

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Nkisi & Sote in conversation - Sonic Futurisms

Moderated by Lain Iwakura

“I am Sun Ra. Ambassador from the intergalactic regions of the council of outer space.
- How do we know you are for real?
- How do you know I am real? I‘m not real, I‘m just like you. You don‘t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn‘t be seeking equal rights. You‘re not real. If you were, you‘d have some status among the nations of the world. So we‘re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as a myth, because that‘s what black people are, myths. I come to you from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago.” (Sun Ra “space is the place”)

Sun Ra, in his MythScience, like Sonic-Fiction or Auto-Fiction, points towards a certain need for those non-real non-beings to shift reality, by rewriting history against his-story. Telling stories, or more precisely, by creating myths those deemed to not exist can re-enter the real world and enter the scene of history by using vibrational technology, a(nArchi)Tek(ture), as fiction-force.

Fictions "of worlds or social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the dominant organisations of life currently in existence." (David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan “Fictioning”) Although the reality of bodies & lifes might exist without articulation, their specific embodied suffering, pain & joys have a need for being made accessible by fictioning, which can and should be perceived as a struggle against alienation. Fictioning in this sense is not unhinged speculation, but transformation/transmut(e)ation of unspoken physicality.

Against the cruelty of lived experience the process of fictioning introduces some sort of playfulness. Therefore can sonic-fictions and -futurisms offer tools for counter-worldbuilding against the lived present? When rhythm and fiction connect as pulsating interruption against linear time, are they able to introduce different timelines, to produce grids and infrastructure for different futurities? And in which way can they be organized as ecologies of secret technologies, to provide gateways into the yet unknown?

About Lain Iwakura

Lain Iwakura is a sound & performance artist, DJ, sound engineer, writer and activist based in Graz. She studied musicology/sociology/philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, is currently doing her master's degree in computer music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz and is a scholarship student at The New Centre of Research and Practice. Together with Achim Szepanski, she runs the two music labels ‘Force Inc.’ & ‘mille plateaux’. In Graz she co-founded the collective ‘O’, is part of the ‘institute for sonic welfare’ and in the music team of the Forum Stadtpark, as well as co-founder of the awareness group ‘awaGraz’, and member of the collective ‘CMKK’.

For several years now she has been dealing with polychronicity, the non-philosophy of time & rhythm, the escape to Uchronia, in this context she developed the exhibition ‘ATC - Against the Clock’ with Jeronimo Voss. With her Social Noise Performances, she combines the question of social composition with vulnerability and the limitations of subjectivation. She is currently working on a project about the connection between sonic fiction & auto-theory as a necessary mytho-scientific practice of fictioning, as writing oneself into the world of dehumanised people, as well as the irreality of cis-gender in view of a transsexuality that includes all people.

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Collective Imaginations & Liberations in Club-Worlds
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Moderated by মm.
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We have found, over the recent years, that practitioners and audiences of western-european club cultures have become increasingly interested in discourses, trends and representation of global club music cultures. This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of and collaborative exchange among organizers and artists who are also carving their own spaces in local, regional as well as diasporic communities for electronic music and dance cultures that represent their ethnic, linguistic and socio-political realities, histories and legacies. As communities and cultures from the global Majority participate more and more in club discourses to reclaim narratives and critique gazes of western metropoles over racialized cultures, we see them evolve into and create new club-worlds that resist and reform the aesthetic, social and economic rules of western club cultures. Some of these new club-worlds are furthermore queer, both in the traditional as well as the radical sense of challenging us to imagine new, resistant ways of being in the club and on the dance floor.

‍How do these groups come together, and why? What are the ways in which these spaces are carved out - physically, ideologically, socially and aesthetically? What are the challenges that they are met with, especially among diasporic communities based in europe?

About Luna Al-Mousli

In the mornings, Luna Al-Mousli is a freelance author, graphic designer and curator. Her books investigate themes of identity, politics and the power of memory. Al-Mousli is a published author whose works have been translated into numerous languages and have won numerous prizes. Her latest book, "Around Me Stories", was published in 2022 by Edition W, Frankfurt. During the night and as قamareen (Qamareen), she’s a DJ who spins your favorite feel-good SWANA sounds, seamlessly blending pop, indie and electronic beats. Her sets take you on a musical journey where lyrics matter just as much as the melody. With قamareen every night is illuminated by the magic of two moons, ensuring an unforgettable dance floor experience which fuses the nostalgic rhythm of the past with beats of the future.

Raqsouna is both an event series & a feeling, with Zalghoutas, Halay, Dabke & people enjoying each other's company through dancing. Co-founded by Luna Al-mousli, Raqsouna strives to redefine party and club culture through creating a space that focusses on Music and Musicians from the SWANA region, transcending on the focus of the sound experience alone and attempting at celebrating the BIPOC diaspora in Vienna through setting an actively and ever evolving caring space. In all of her work, she is eager to engage in thought-provoking social and political dialogues. Her interdisciplinary collaborations undoubtedly challenge and contribute to shaping the discourse. ING.: luna.almousli ING.: Raqsouna

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Panelist - "Vienna's Lack of Clubspaces II" (Discussion)

2017 Martina Brunner started the initiative Night Mayor Vienna with the aim to strengthen awareness for the social, cultural and economic relevance of nightlife and club culture. From 2020 she was part of the organizational development team of the pilot project Vienna Club Commission funded by the City of Vienna. Since 2022, she has been the executive director of the VCC.

Panelist - "Vienna's Lack of Clubspaces II" (Discussion)

Mena Huber knows the club from almost every perspective. From cloakroom attendant to organiser to manager, she has been through almost everything, including a dismissal due to industrial action. She is involved in the non-profit cultural centre 4lthangrund and earns her living as a production manager for festivals in various areas.

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Collective Imaginations & Liberations in Club-Worlds
‍
Moderated by মm.
‍
We have found, over the recent years, that practitioners and audiences of western-european club cultures have become increasingly interested in discourses, trends and representation of global club music cultures. This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of and collaborative exchange among organizers and artists who are also carving their own spaces in local, regional as well as diasporic communities for electronic music and dance cultures that represent their ethnic, linguistic and socio-political realities, histories and legacies. As communities and cultures from the global Majority participate more and more in club discourses to reclaim narratives and critique gazes of western metropoles over racialized cultures, we see them evolve into and create new club-worlds that resist and reform the aesthetic, social and economic rules of western club cultures. Some of these new club-worlds are furthermore queer, both in the traditional as well as the radical sense of challenging us to imagine new, resistant ways of being in the club and on the dance floor.

How do these groups come together, and why? What are the ways in which these spaces are carved out - physically, ideologically, socially and aesthetically? What are the challenges that they are met with, especially among diasporic communities based in europe?

About Negin Rezaie

Negin Rezaie is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and researcher specializing in visual and performance arts from South Iran. Since 2018, she has been one of the curators for the permanent exhibition "The Shores of Austria" at the Volkskundemuseum in Vienna, contributing to the documentation of immigration history. Negin has led various art projects, including the 2022 art-science collaboration "Symbiopoeisis" for Wienwoche and the 2024 "SymbioMemory" performance and exhibition for the Klima Biennale at FLUCC Vienna. Protest archive in hinterland gallery, Rotor gallery Graz and FLUCC Vienna. Her work explores themes of identity, unity, resistance, and archiving the unarchivable, often drawing inspiration from Iranian poetry. She is involved in the "Autosociobiography" artistic research program at the Filmakademie since 2020, focusing on social-political shame. Alongside Marissa Lobo, she co-curated the "Soft Club: Politics of Hospitality and Hosting, Joy and Celebration," running since June 2024 at the Volkskundemuseum.

In her latest work, "Liberty Leading the People," Negin reenacted Delacroix's painting, making a statement on unity and empowerment. In June 2024, she led a collective performance at MQ: this takes Space! creating a massive signal orange installation. The installation reflects the idea that, although a global crisis is unfolding and encroaching on spaces,resistance is rising from the Grassroots, it emphasise that Victory is a collective matter and we continue taking spaces. 

Nkisi & Sote in conversation - Sonic Futurisms

Moderated by Lain Iwakura

“I am Sun Ra. Ambassador from the intergalactic regions of the council of outer space.
- How do we know you are for real?
- How do you know I am real? I‘m not real, I‘m just like you. You don‘t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn‘t be seeking equal rights. You‘re not real. If you were, you‘d have some status among the nations of the world. So we‘re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as a myth, because that‘s what black people are, myths. I come to you from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago.” (Sun Ra “space is the place”)

Sun Ra, in his MythScience, like Sonic-Fiction or Auto-Fiction, points towards a certain need for those non-real non-beings to shift reality, by rewriting history against his-story. Telling stories, or more precisely, by creating myths those deemed to not exist can re-enter the real world and enter the scene of history by using vibrational technology, a(nArchi)Tek(ture), as fiction-force.

Fictions "of worlds or social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the dominant organisations of life currently in existence." (David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan “Fictioning”) Although the reality of bodies & lifes might exist without articulation, their specific embodied suffering, pain & joys have a need for being made accessible by fictioning, which can and should be perceived as a struggle against alienation. Fictioning in this sense is not unhinged speculation, but transformation/transmut(e)ation of unspoken physicality.

Against the cruelty of lived experience the process of fictioning introduces some sort of playfulness. Therefore can sonic-fictions and -futurisms offer tools for counter-worldbuilding against the lived present? When rhythm and fiction connect as pulsating interruption against linear time, are they able to introduce different timelines, to produce grids and infrastructure for different futurities? And in which way can they be organized as ecologies of secret technologies, to provide gateways into the yet unknown?
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About Nkisi

Nkisi produces intense, powerful sonics influenced by ancient Kongo rhythms, rhythmic noise, our planetary electromagnetic grid, and experimental improvisation. The creative musician and visual artist is one of the co-founders of NON Worldwide. She recently launched her label INITIATION and research platform The Secret Institute, exploring the secrets and mysteries of vibrational rhythm, the ritual as a socio-political tool, invisible gestural sonics, noise tantra, and strategies of trance.

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»Sonic Notional Species: Rashad Becker in conversation with Isabella Forciniti« (Artisttalk)
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Speculative microcosms and sonic identities organized into sounds invite us to engage with a new logic, allowing us to reposition and recenter ourselves within a novel auditory world. The sonic entities we perceive can lead us to the inaudible—sounds that exist but go unheard because of physiological, social, political, or ideological factors, as well as individual tastes and preferences. As we, as listeners, explore new systems of actuality, the creation of fictional sonic species merges with the transformation of the invisible into the audible. Do sonic species contribute to a non-normative narrative?  Is it their lack of formality that, coupled with their disregard for perfection and virtuosity, opens up opportunities for a new speculative logic?Together with Rashad Becker, we will explore sonic entities, speculative design and the intriguing realm of inaudibility.

About Rashad Becker
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The sounds of German-Syrian producer and renowned mastering engineer Rashad Becker open an imaginary space. Interested in the sonic creation of a fictional species, including its traditional dances and songs, Becker uses his modular synthesiser to create sounding entities that enter into communication with each other. They talk, they sing, they fight, they interact and let us enter a sphere where every creature, no matter which space it inhabits, has equal rights to exist. It’s sonic fiction par excellence.

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LISTENING/RECORDING - impossible worlds (Lecture-Performance)

This curatorial performance explores the possibility of listening to and recording of impossible worlds in order to together try to hear their actuality. I will play works, draw lines, read words and non-worded utterances to query the aesthetics and politics of impossibility. The aim is to extend the auditory worlding of sonic possible worlds to understand the artefact of reality and access the fiction of the apparently unreal. From there we might ponder its consequences and the “then what” of its impossible possibility.

About Salomé Voegelin

Salomé Voegelin is a researcher and artist engaged in listening as a socio-political practice. She works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet in the contemporary crises of climate and public health, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric realities can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities.

Voegelin writes articles and papers, texts and text-scores for performance and publication. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018). Her most recent publication Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands, Bloomsbury 2023, moves curation through the double negative of not not to ‘uncuration’: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.

Her practice engages in participatory, collective and communal approaches: since 2008 she regularly collaborates with David Mollin (Mollin+Voegelin) in a practice that reconsiders socio-political, architectural and aesthetic actualities from the blindspots of a leaky vision. Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

Armen Avanessian in conversation with Julia Grillmayr

Moderated by Shilla Strelka

Armen Avanessian will be joining the discussion online! 

About Shilla Strelka

Shilla Strelka is a festival curator, concert organiser, lecturer and journalist, based in Vienna. She studied digital media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and graduated in theatre, film and media studies, philosophy, art history and German literature. Her curatorial practice focuses on sonic experiments and dissident musical languages. Her research approach revolves around concepts of post-fundamental (sonic) communities and a politics of aesthetics. 

Strelka founded the concert series Struma+Iodine in 2012. Since 2015 she is the artistic director and organizer of Unsafe+Sounds Festival. She teaches at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg and at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. She is curating Klangraum Krems Minoritenkirche, and is part of the Elevate Festival's team of curators in Graz.

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Nkisi & Sote in conversation - Sonic Futurisms

Moderated by Lain Iwakura

“I am Sun Ra. Ambassador from the intergalactic regions of the council of outer space.
- How do we know you are for real?
- How do you know I am real? I‘m not real, I‘m just like you. You don‘t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn‘t be seeking equal rights. You‘re not real. If you were, you‘d have some status among the nations of the world. So we‘re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as a myth, because that‘s what black people are, myths. I come to you from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago.” (Sun Ra “space is the place”)

Sun Ra, in his MythScience, like Sonic-Fiction or Auto-Fiction, points towards a certain need for those non-real non-beings to shift reality, by rewriting history against his-story. Telling stories, or more precisely, by creating myths those deemed to not exist can re-enter the real world and enter the scene of history by using vibrational technology, a(nArchi)Tek(ture), as fiction-force.

Fictions "of worlds or social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the dominant organisations of life currently in existence." (David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan “Fictioning”) Although the reality of bodies & lifes might exist without articulation, their specific embodied suffering, pain & joys have a need for being made accessible by fictioning, which can and should be perceived as a struggle against alienation. Fictioning in this sense is not unhinged speculation, but transformation/transmut(e)ation of unspoken physicality.

Against the cruelty of lived experience the process of fictioning introduces some sort of playfulness. Therefore can sonic-fictions and -futurisms offer tools for counter-worldbuilding against the lived present? When rhythm and fiction connect as pulsating interruption against linear time, are they able to introduce different timelines, to produce grids and infrastructure for different futurities? And in which way can they be organized as ecologies of secret technologies, to provide gateways into the yet unknown?

On Ata Ebtekar

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran, Iran. His wide-ranging love of rich sounds and textures is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Diagonal, SVBKVLT, Sub Rosa, Morphine, and Opal Tapes.

Ebtekar’s compositions and installations weave expansive sonic tales that exhibit a strong engagement with electro-acoustic techniques, sound design, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs. His vivid soundscapes employ various synthesis strategies and DSP techniques, both in analogue and digital environments.

Much of his output deals with a continual exploration of abstract musical form as a commentary and reflection on current social and political experiences, mental states, and the human condition. His music challenges the listener with mutating sonic movements that contrast moments of fleeting melodic beauty and deep emotion with painful dissonance and abrasive noise. On his latest album Ministry of Tall Tales, out in February 2024 on SVBKVLT, Sote has further intensified this compositional approach in an attempt to process the immense amount of frustration, anger, confusion, helplessness and fear he went through in the recent years because of what has been happening in his surroundings and in Iran’s sociopolitical system. Consequently, he describes the album’s all-synthesis based music as an equally dark, melodic, and noise-driven contemplation on corruption, oppression and murder.

Sote’s ability to combine emotional depth with a relentlessly maximalist aesthetic is unique – as, for example, heard on 2022’s Majestic Noise in Beautiful Rotten Iran, about which The Sound Projector wrote that it »demands all your attention and, once it has all your focus, it takes it over entirely«, or on Hardcore Sounds from Tehran, which was listed on The Quietus’ Top 100 albums of 2016, and saw Sote re-invent high-energy banging hardcore by twisting it into challenging rhythmic and sonic structures. With the Sound System Persepolis album, released on Diagonal in July 2024, Sote revisits and actualizes his unique take on hardcore to once again push the very limits of contemporary underground brain/body music. It is a futuristic hardcore album of pummellingly rhythmic and harmonically complex computer music, which takes its name from Persepolis: the beating heart and administrative centre of the historical Persian Empire. Even at low volumes the harmonics, rhythmic textures and buffeting decay conjure the sense of a monumental rig (as featured on the album artwork) playing at earth-shaking volume, capable of displacing huge volumes of air, yet with barely a kick or a snare in sight. Intended to be performed live, on muscular and multi-channel soundsystems whether gallery or club, this computer music is not only meant to be heard but felt by the listener: its brutalist vibrational polyrhythms make it impossible to stand still, its directive to move standing in contrast with the more academically rooted computer music and sound art that has explored the same sound synthesis techniques used on the album.
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On Ata Ebtekar

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran, Iran. His wide-ranging love of rich sounds and textures is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Diagonal, SVBKVLT, Sub Rosa, Morphine, and Opal Tapes.

Ebtekar’s compositions and installations weave expansive sonic tales that exhibit a strong engagement with electro-acoustic techniques, sound design, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs. His vivid soundscapes employ various synthesis strategies and DSP techniques, both in analogue and digital environments.

Much of his output deals with a continual exploration of abstract musical form as a commentary and reflection on current social and political experiences, mental states, and the human condition. His music challenges the listener with mutating sonic movements that contrast moments of fleeting melodic beauty and deep emotion with painful dissonance and abrasive noise. On his latest album Ministry of Tall Tales, out in February 2024 on SVBKVLT, Sote has further intensified this compositional approach in an attempt to process the immense amount of frustration, anger, confusion, helplessness and fear he went through in the recent years because of what has been happening in his surroundings and in Iran’s sociopolitical system. Consequently, he describes the album’s all-synthesis based music as an equally dark, melodic, and noise-driven contemplation on corruption, oppression and murder.

Sote’s ability to combine emotional depth with a relentlessly maximalist aesthetic is unique – as, for example, heard on 2022’s Majestic Noise in Beautiful Rotten Iran, about which The Sound Projector wrote that it »demands all your attention and, once it has all your focus, it takes it over entirely«, or on Hardcore Sounds from Tehran, which was listed on The Quietus’ Top 100 albums of 2016, and saw Sote re-invent high-energy banging hardcore by twisting it into challenging rhythmic and sonic structures. With the Sound System Persepolis album, released on Diagonal in July 2024, Sote revisits and actualizes his unique take on hardcore to once again push the very limits of contemporary underground brain/body music. It is a futuristic hardcore album of pummellingly rhythmic and harmonically complex computer music, which takes its name from Persepolis: the beating heart and administrative centre of the historical Persian Empire. Even at low volumes the harmonics, rhythmic textures and buffeting decay conjure the sense of a monumental rig (as featured on the album artwork) playing at earth-shaking volume, capable of displacing huge volumes of air, yet with barely a kick or a snare in sight. Intended to be performed live, on muscular and multi-channel soundsystems whether gallery or club, this computer music is not only meant to be heard but felt by the listener: its brutalist vibrational polyrhythms make it impossible to stand still, its directive to move standing in contrast with the more academically rooted computer music and sound art that has explored the same sound synthesis techniques used on the album.

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How to Live in the Future of Others? (Keynote+Listening Session)

Drawing on the history of the Başqorttar, or Bashqorts, a Turkic ethnic group indigenous to the Urals in North Asia and historically subjugated by Russia, this presentation will not provide a definitive answer to the titular question. Instead, it will explore the difficulties cultural workers face when choosing to pursue a path of counter-colonial resistance. To reframe the main question: if colonized ethnicities and their cultures are inevitably destined to fade under the weight of assimilation, does singing the songs of ancestors still hold any political potential? Or has the future already been determined by those who were stronger and more violent, relegating oppressed ethnicities to an "exotic', purely exhibitional and performative role?

About Stas Shärifulla

Stas Shärifulla, also known as HMOT, is an artist-researcher based in Basel, working with sound and decoloniality.

Born and raised in East Siberia, Russia, with Başqort (Bashqort) roots, Stas takes this dual heritage as a starting point to study the politics of indigeneity, reflecting on both personal and global perspectives. Exploring a variety of sonic and listening practices, both indigenous and non-indigenous, Stas is focused on how their interactions enable the transformation of political imagination into direct action, and vice versa, examining the process that turns these practices into tools for community-building and the preservation of collective memory. As a self-taught computer musician and quraysı, Stas designs live performances around the idea of how musical traditions mutate and evolve when approached by someone with a remote, secondhand perspective.

Stas' works have been showcased at numerous international venues and events, including Manifesta 10, Volksbühne (Berlin), Jan Van Eyck Academie, Fondation Beyeler, CTM Festival, Transmediale, Kaserne Basel, Rhythmic Music Conservatory (Copenhagen), Palazzo delle Zattere (Venice), Rote Fabrik (Zürich), Berghain (Berlin), MaerzMusik Festival, Biennale for Sound and Listening (Struer), Unsound Festival (Kazan), Copernicus Science Centre (Warsaw), Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall (Yerevan), Ausstellungsraum Klingental (Basel), LOM Space (Bratislava), and many others. This body of work includes mixed-media installations, lectures, and interventions, often addressing themes such as identity-based oppression, forced migration and resource extractivism. Stas is currently an Associate Researcher at Critical Media Lab in Basel, a Gastdozent at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW (Basel) and Sound Studies and Sonic Arts UdK (Berlin), and is pursuing a doctoral degree at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Basel.

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Challenges of World Building – The Norient Perspective (Moderated Talk)

For 20 years now, Norient and Thomas Burkhalter have been trying to get closer to cultural phenomena and movements in and around music and sound. In this personal presentation, Burkhalter will suggest principles that seem important to him when writing about music, examining it in a documentary film, screening it at the Norient Festival, or exhibiting it. He does not claim that these principles are exhaustive. However, what they do advocate for are: in-depth, long-term and self-aware research; fair collaboration with researchers from different disciplines and with journalists and artists from different places and of different genders and generations; endorsing artists, attacking stereotypical ideas of cultures as fixed entities, showing solidarity with people in war and crisis, and finding ways forward from the challenging demands of identity politics; searching for multimodal formats of representation that open up spaces for complexity and plurality; and consequently trying to create new ways of telling stories to keep reaching new people and audiences—and not handing over the power to define things to big companies and players.

Following the presentation, Jasemin Khaleli will join Thomas Burkhalter to critically engage with his principles and open the discussion to the audience for a larger conversation about methodologies, ethics and principles that affect cultural producers and journalists in projects such as Norient.

About Thomas Burkhalter

 Thomas Burkhalter is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, AV-artist, and writer from Bern, Switzerland. He is the founder and director of Norient (Norient.com) and the Norient Festival, co-directed documentary films (e.g., Contradict, Berner Filmpreis 2020), AV/theatre performances, and is the author and co-editor of several books (e.g., Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut, Routledge, The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East, Wesleyan University Press).

Currently, he is working on his new music project Melodies In My Head, and on the podcast series Long Take: Life as an Artist with musicians from the UK, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.

মm. (read: mwo, just like the bangla alphabet) is an independent DJ, curator and community organizer based in Dhaka & Vienna. In a poorly separated dimension of their life where they are not trying to remain invisible behind an unreadable pseudonym, they are also a scholar of critical gender studies and anthropology of religion. They work with postcolonial and intersectional frameworks and methodologies to study emergent assemblages and move towards decolonial praxis in their academic work, such that their scholarly work is built upon the ethnographic insights they are privileged to have via very personal and communal grassroots work they do as a queer-feminist organizer in self-organized communities. Their doctoral research studies Sufi Sama' rituals of Hijra people in Bangladesh, with aims to contribute to decolonial critiques of secularism, citizenship and Islamic intellectual & discursive developments in postcolonial modern nation-states by studying mediations of gender, religion and aural/oral performance. In the context of club culture, they are interested in global South dialogues and diasporic exchanges; self-organizing politics & practices of racialized & queer folks; and embodied cultures of dance. They also like to irritate snobs by blurring lines between high and low art in their own work as a DJ.

They are founding members of the Dhaka-based karkhana collective and Vienna-based Spice Mixers. They are also involved in curatorial work for Struma+Iodine and Unsafe+Sounds.

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Anna Ehrenstein is an Albanian-German artist exploring forms of knowledge and their construction. Her post-photographic sculptural and virtual installations, moving image and textile works, and social interactions challenge networked objects, images, ideas, and epistemologies in a post-digital, neocolonial, interconnected, and hybridized world. Through extensive research and collaboration, redistribution of Global North resources, and subversion of the hierarchies of authorship, her artistic practice examines how technology and digital-material culture reshape power relations as well as the boundaries of lens-based media - a methodology she calls “precarious assemblage.” Ehrenstein views critique as an act of love and believes in the radical possibilities of spiritual coalition, ritual, neuroplasticity, collective unlearning, and constant renewal.

Raised between Germany and Albania, Ehrenstein studied photography and media art in Germany and attended curatorial courses in Valetta, Malta, and Lagos, Nigeria. From 2023 to 2024, she was a guest professor in the interdisciplinary MA program "New Practice in Art and Technology" at TU and UDK Berlin. In 2020, she received the C/O Berlin Talent Award for "New Documentary Strategies." Ehrenstein has participated in numerous international residencies and exhibited at the Lagos Biennale, Ural Biennale in Yekaterinburg, KOW Berlin, C/O Berlin Foundation, Kunstverein Braunschweig, and Kunstraum Kreuzberg among others. She lives and works between Berlin, Tirana, and the cloud.

The Balkanization of the Cloud

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Charlotte Eifler is an artist spanning moving image, installation, XR, and performance. In her work, she deals with the politics of representation in relation to technology. Focusing on queer feminist approaches and elements of science fiction, she explores processes of image & history production and imaginations of alternative futures. A special focus is placed on the material infrastructures of the internet and the intertwined history of military, science, and art.

Charlotte Eifler has presented her works at ACM Siggraph Art in Los Angeles, Sapporo International Art Festival in Japan, Le Printemps de Toulouse, IMPAKT Utrecht, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Art Basel, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin among others. Her works have also been featured in numerous international screenings. Residencies and scholarships have enabled her international research in Moscow, New York, Ghent, and Mexico City and Paris among others. She teaches in the Departement of Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and is part of the networks Digital Critique, unlearning canon_intersectional teaching in art & design, elsehere, feat.Fem and Breaking the Spell.

feminism is a browser

//ongoing video and archival online project//

A cyber entity connects with an international feminist network of media pioneers and questions the future of the internet.

The fictional character Yeva is bored in their webspace Rosegarden. Raised on the internet, Yeva claims to be the child of the Network Faces. The Faces mailing list was founded in 1996 and it's 300 members are living all over the globe. Yeva wants to meet their so called mothers and dives into a feminist revision of the internet.

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Laura Lintrup is a Copenhagen-born, Vienna-based artist. Her work is situated between a minimalist sculptural approach and theatrically-auratic stage design. In her commissioned installation for Unsafe+Sounds, Lintrup develops ethereal atmospheres through fluid textures, and seemingly opposing haptics, light and architectural elements.

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Pierre-Christophe Gam is a French-born conceptual artist whose contemporary multimedia installations investigate the future, through myths and dreams.

With roots in Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, and Congo, he sees himself as carrying on the great tradition of the Griots of West Africa, the keepers of communal memories. He crafts stories that draw from ancient myths rooted in Africa's pre-colonial heritage, bringing them to life through interactive, physical, and virtual spaces that foster learning, connection, and imagination.

He founded TOGUNA WORLD, a digital-native research laboratory that merges art, design, mythology, and foresight to decolonize conversations about the future and amplify diverse voices from the Global South. A fellow at the MIT Open Doc Lab, his work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Addis Foto Fest, and the Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam, among others. He trained as an interior architect at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at Central Saint Martins in London.

The Sanctuary of Dreams

The Sanctuary of Dreams is a dream world, fusing Art, music, animation and storytelling to support a Future-dreaming ritual through which participants can envision desirable future scenarios guided by their innermost desires.

Informed by IFA, an ancient divination system from West Africa, it takes the form of a digital temple composed of five buildings, built around an open courtyard and nested within a lush, primordial garden. According to IFA, in order to achieve a truly satisfying and fulfilling life, one must consider five fundamental pillars: Ce-Meji pertains to the Body, Ka-Ogbe to the Mind, Gbe-Meji to the Spirit, Sa-Meji to the Heart and Yeku-Meji to the Soul. The pillars are introduced through the five buildings, in the format of mixed-media photo, 3D and digital collage animations, each considering the visible and the invisible dimension of their corresponding principle.

The centerpiece is “The Dream Manifesto”, an eight-minute long film which introduces the philosophy behind the Future-dreaming ritual. It invites us to question our perception of reality and expand our dreams for the future beyond socially conditioned limiting beliefs

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Rohan Ayinde is an anadisciplinary artist and poet based between London and Chicago. His work traverses audio, visual and literary forms and often embraces installation and performance. Through an entanglement with the phenomenon of the black hole, his practice attempts to excavate an architecture of ideology through the analytical framework of black feminist thought. Investigating how the politics of place intersects with the conceptual, his poems, drawings, videos and performance work are translations and sketches of landscapes built from a freedom best imagined by writers like Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Lola Olufemi and Edouard Glissant.

Ayinde is one half of the wayward/motile collaborative duo i.as.in.we, with friend/producer/dancer Yewande YoYo Odunubi. He received his MA in Visual and Critical Studies from SAIC (2019) and is currently the Director at Blanc gallery (Chicago). His most recent work is iwoyi: within the echo, a 5-screen-installation created with Tayo Rapoport for Beyond The Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music, at the British Library (2024).

Swallows Utopia
Swallows Utopia reflects on the contested and complex history of Bijlmermeer (the Bijlmer), a neighbourhood in Amsterdam that was designed and built in the late 60’s. The film ruminates on the way the Bijlmer has inhabited different locations within Netherland’s public imaginary, from ‘utopian housing project’ to ‘crime-infested ghetto’. Swallows Utopia thinks through the contradictions of place-making and the continual rub between architectural spaces and the bodies they house. At the centre of the piece is a consideration for the entangled timelines that are made apparent by the lives of the immigrants that have made the Bijlmer home.

‍Swallows Utopia takes the Bijlmer as a cypher to think about the way housing projects around the world have been made with, or without, particular bodies in mind. It asks us to think about a world created from the continuing legacies of racial capitalism and colonialism and to contend with the ruptures that necessarily appear in the fabric of a world designed from such unsustainable ideas.  The film is about black bodies, resilience, movement, gentrification, and the potential that lies on the horizon of the black imagination. It is about the blurring of worlds and the cross-pollination of ideas and experiences that are made thousands of miles apart. It is about the ways an afro-diasporic condition can be analysed from sites across the world, knitted together by a set of shared and divergent histories.

‍Swallows Utopia was made for a project called Radical Space under the umbrella of Shebang Amsterdam, curated by Richard Kofi and supported by Imagine IC, CBK Zuidoost and Bijlmer Parktheater. The other artists involved were Smita James (NL), Adama Delphine Fawundu (USA), Poernima Gobardhan (NL) and Desta Deekman (NL).

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