Research Catalogue

The group acts as an open and inclusive formation for artist-researchers who share an interest and practice in working with sound. The group is committed to the indispensable action of encouraging and supporting personas of all diversity to participate and join in the collective exploration in and through sound, sensing and amplifying the heard, unheard as well as the overheard. As a collective the group welcomes contributors who are willing and eager to share their idea and practices, think collectively and are interested in shaping a emancipatory sonic futurism.

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.

In the early years of the Soviet era, the music of two Russian faith traditions was forced into the shadows. Siberian shamans preserved chants and folk knowledge despite intense persecution, and Russian Orthodox monks preserved early forms of plainchant in remote monasteries away from the watchful eye of the government. Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), herself a member of the richly-historied and often-marginalized Tatar people, became a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian in the 1960s. During the 1970s, she began performing improvisations with her ensemble Astraea, familiarizing herself with many instruments used by Siberian shamans. Her references to shamanism continued to increase among her concert-hall compositions over the following decades. As a new generation began to embrace the freedom to part from state-sponsored atheism during the 1990s and 2000s, shamanic chanting and Russian Orthodox Znamenny chant experienced a renaissance of practice and scholarly interest. Gubaidulina responded with her music: in her 2005 flute concerto …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Gubaidulina’s flute soloist takes on the role of chanter. Drawing on Tia DeNora’s research in the sociology of concerto forms, Kofi Agawu’s framework of musical “topics,” and the composer’s own reflections on the concerto metaphor, this article analyzes how Gubaidulina frames the solo flutist as Siberian shaman and Russian Orthodox cantor within subsequent episodes of this concerto. In this way, the soloist “speaks” through the music of these faith traditions that remained underground for much of Gubaidulina’s adult life. …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair is a flute concerto deserving of its title, demonstrating the dynamic potential of works by post-Soviet composers to contend with the sociological tensions that affect any individual whose cultural, ethnic, or spiritual identity has been the target of discriminatory policies.

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.