Research Catalogue

The aim of this PD project is to bring artists and citizens together with each other and their environment, and collectively explore how the wordless voice can be a means of communication. Artists leading this project bring understanding from the multiple fields in which they are working – music, theatre, visual arts, and circus. In addition to the collective exploration of connection, the objective is to propose a methodology (which combines and develops from a range of existing methods and is provisionally termed “Resonant Cycles”) and investigate if it can have a transformative impact on the subjectivities of the individual participants. The project involves interventions in the field of performing arts with the goal of modeling less language-dependent and more inclusive, sensory-rich experiences of cross-disciplinary creation and performance. It invites a holistic and immersive experience of performing arts that brings the physical voice to the forefront and prompts reflection on the essence and meaning of vocal sound regardless of language, and the way that sound itself functions as a means of communication.

Brera Academy of Fine Arts announces the international seminar Theories and practices of contemporary artistic research: a transdisciplinary approach. The event marks the launch of the project IartNET - an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage in Higher Education in the Arts and Music,funded by NextGenerationEU and coordinated by Nicoletta Leonardi. Following the establishment of doctoral programs at Italian higher arts education institutions in 2024, the seminar addresses artistic research from a transdisciplinary perspective across different genres and media, responding to the need for discussions and exchange on ideas, methodologies, and practices of artistic research at an international level.

Documentación sobre la investigación artística de ConCuerpos en el 2023 en torno a la Accesibilidad Universal en Danza, llamada Cancionero para la Ausencia.

Maria Vilkovisky is a poetess, musician, artist, and curator born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She graduated from the Kazakh State Conservatory as a violist, worked in the opera house orchestra, studied at the “Musagethes” literary school for writers in Almaty and at the curatorial summer school in Moscow. She is co-founder of a long-term para-institutional project called Krëlex zentre (together with Ruthia Jenrbekova), and from 2011–2014 she ran an art space in Almaty. She lives and works in Almaty and Vienna. Ruthia Jenrbekova is an artist and researcher from Almaty, Kazakhstan. She holds an MA in ecology and works as an intermedia cultural organizer. She is co-founder of Krëlex zentre together with Maria Vilkovisky. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and lives and works in Almaty and Vienna. Her fields of interest: queer ecology, material semiotics, arts-based methodologies, transfeminism. Krëlex zentre is a paranormal art institution that builds on cultural traditions of intermixed planetary diasporas, develops inclusive aesthetics, and promotes queer cosmo-politics. This interview by poet and Sound Studies scholar Vadim Keylin took place from March to April 2024 via Google Docs and has been edited for clarity. Literature references were added during the editing process.

In February 1967, a funeral service was held for the Georgian singer and choirmaster Artem Erkomaishvili. As they bore his body from the municipal theatre in Ozurgeti to his family plot in a nearby village, a recording of the Georgian Orthodox rite for the dead emanated from a portable tape player. The voice on the recording belonged to Artem himself – by this time, no one else in officially atheist Soviet Georgia knew the traditional requiem chants. The previous year, Artem had been involved in an experimental recording at the Tbilisi Conservatory, and he later applied the same technique to capture the three-part chants: going back and forth between two tape recorders, he overdubbed his own voice until all three parts were layered together. Artem’s remarkable, six-decade career stretched from the earliest commercial recordings of Georgian folk music in 1907 to the widespread use of consumer tape-recording technology in the 1960s. His chant recordings – both the conservatory project and the private funeral tapes – were made outside of formal channels of music production and distribution, employing amateur equipment and foregrounding the intimacy of the unvarnished voice. In this way, they resemble magnitizdat, the private tape recordings of poetry and song that circulated unofficially in the late Soviet period (Daughtry 2009). Made at a time when sacred music was still heavily censored, Artem’s recordings occupied the grey area between officially sanctioned and explicitly dissident expression. Building on recent work exploring sound in everyday Soviet experience (Cornish 2020) and expanding the discussion of Georgian music beyond the disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology, I argue that such private practices of listening and recording provided a means for Georgians in the post-Thaw era to grapple with questions of faith, the loss of tradition, the polyphony of a fracturing state, and the afterlife of a single voice.

This article provides an overview and analysis of transformations of the Belarusian political soundscape. Based on the author’s archive of audio recordings made in Minsk and other Belarusian cities in 2016-2023, the article analyzes how protesters and the authorities used voices, noises, and music during the major political protests of recent years. The field recordings became the starting points for a further discussion on the multifaceted role of sound, music, and silence in contesting for urban and political space in Belarus. The “loudest” period in the country’s recent history is then put in a wider context of studying the clashing ideologies of the authoritarian regime and the democratic, pro-independence movement. The study of audio materials is accompanied by participant observations, interviews, and an extensive analysis of Belarusian and international media that reveal various sonic practices used by the country’s and its critics. The primary goal of this article is to address the gaps in studies of the contemporary Belarusian political soundscape and independent music scenes.