Intermediality And Text-to-Sound Transmutations. Interview with Maria Vilkovisky and Ruthia Jenrbekova of krëlex zentre
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.
VK: Your practice is very diverse: you stage performances, make installations, write poetry, but you both also have some kind of musical background. What role does sound play in your art activities? How do you approach sound as an artistic medium?
MV: I think sound is the glue that binds all these diverse practices together, sound in both written and performed form.
RJ: This ostensible diversity is the result of us experimenting in the field of intermedia: we were curious to find out what it means today not to have an area of artistic specialization and how this situation has been conceptualized in terms like “intermedia” (Higgins and Higgins 2001), “post-media” (Kraus 1999), or even “deskilling” (Roberts 2010). The question of what exactly it is that the so-called interdisciplinary artists are busy with today is generally a tricky one and becomes even more interesting in the light of post-media/post-studio discourse.
MV: Moreover, having been influenced by the Bishkek queer communists from SHTAB, we see ourselves more as workers engaged in cultural production, and from that angle the question of the artistic medium becomes less central and more technical.
RJ: In their 2012 manifesto Politicization of Experience, Oxana Shatalova and Georgy Mamedov of SHTAB wrote that McLuhan’s formula should be reversed: it is not the artist’s medium-specific skill that defines the message; on the contrary, it is the artist themself who chooses the medium that best suits the message they want to transmit. In our case, we don’t so much choose as go through all of them, trying one after another. That’s why we undertook this project in the genre of fake institutions. Krëlex zentre is our para-medium that stages other mediums and mediates our other activities. We write about it in our essay for CEC ArtsLink “Para-Institution As Art Medium”.
MV: And yet, sound has always served us as a sort of intermedial glue. I came to Krëlex zentre from classical music, and Ruth came from punk, electronica, and DJ-ing. We were both interested in sound poetry and eventually arrived at a kind of post-Cageanism. Listening to music, you are always looking at something, while any kind of visuality has a soundtrack: “There’s always something to see, something to hear.” Perhaps, everything we do is mostly a translation of a musical sensibility into other formats and media.
VK: You describe the Krëlex zentre as an imaginary institution. Much of sound art theory emphasizes the virtual and the imaginary – for example, Salomé Voegelin’s (2021) theory of sonic possible worlds or Christoph Cox’s (2018) idea of sound as existing in the state of the Deleuzian virtual (as opposed to music’s actual-ness). Would you relate your practice to such approaches? What do you think in general of sound as the medium of imagination?
MV: Sound for us is undoubtedly the medium that steers the affective realm and gives access to imaginary worlds. It is a perception modality of the non-existent.
RJ: Indeed, the main feature of the Krëlex zentre is that it does not exist, and this simple fact immediately puts us in a situation of multiple realities that manifest themselves to varying degrees (as if with different amplitudes), raising the question of communication between what is there and what is not. What is the relationship between real and unreal? Seeing always externalities, since you can only see what is outside (and is therefore rather objective), while hearing, conversely, internalizes: that which sounds sounds in your head (and is therefore rather subjective).
MV: For example, one of the imaginary worlds most familiar to us is described in Alexey Yurchak’s book Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More as “imaginary West.” Why did this unreal, non-existent place become so popular with late Soviet generations? Maybe because it affected people through audio recordings?
RJ: The importance of musical preferences to the formation of selfhood is well known: at a certain age, the question “What music do you listen to?” is equivalent to the question “What kind of person are you?” In our late Soviet childhood and youth, the recordings of Western musicians played a colossal role. They weren’t just music that we preferred to Soviet schlagers, they were messages from another, different world – wondrous and inaccessible. In that sense, the Beatles indeed rocked the Kremlin![1] Our involvement in contemporary art is certainly partly determined by our shared fascination with the music that was reaching us on records produced in the “imaginary West.”
MV: So listening also means making oneself receptive to spells!
RJ: Yes, it can be said that we got enchanted – have been sung-in – by the sound coming from an inexistent place. At the time we didn’t realize that listening to a record could evoke an entire world lurking behind it – a world that made this record possible – and that this evocation can enchant you and transform you forever. In this sense, music possesses enormous suggestive power.
VK: My first encounter with your work was the ceremony you staged in one of Almaty’s parks to commemorate the 100 years and 33 months anniversary of John Cage. What was the idea and the motivation behind this performance? How does your sound practice in general relate to the experimentalism of the 1960s?
MV: That was part of our slow-moving project Lecture on John Cage.[2] A year before that, there was Lecture on Eric Satie, dedicated among other things to the Parisian circle of proto-avantgardists associated with the cabaret Le Chat Noir and art groups Arts Incohérents and Les Hydropathes.
RJ: Lecture on John Cage was complexly composed. It included a research part, in which we listened to, read, and translated works by and on Cage. Then there was an open-ended hours-long lecture-performance at the ARTiSHOCK theatre in Almaty in 2011. Afterwards we spent a lot of time recording various stuff, some of which was included in the resulting 32-minute album, and finally we closed the chapter on this project with a ceremonial opening of a “counter-monument” dedicated to Cage in one of the city parks of Almaty. It so happened that the composer had an anniversary at the time: 100 years and 33 months. We could not help but celebrate this event. As we’ve already said, it was mainly thanks to Cage’s ideas that we discovered the alchemy of intermedia, the secrets of the transmutation of music into sound, into performance, and into everything else. Actually, it was not so much about ideas, and not so much about Cage as an individual, but rather about the spirit of experimentalism characteristic of the postwar Neue Musik (broadly defined) – the spirit that called into being performance art in its various forms, including Cage’s composition class at the New School of Social Research in the 1950s, the circle of Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, the Düsseldorf scene (with venues like Creamcheese), and the global Fluxus movement. This is an important history for us – the birth of performance art from the spirit of music. Sound and music were integral to this kind of artistic cabaret, whose traditions we have always tried to appropriate. After all, the institutional matrix of the Krëlex zentre is a DIY amateur mini-theatre, and theatre is precisely the site where texts are enacted, transforming one medium into many others. Tellingly, already the very first poster of the Cabaret Voltaire identified its genres as Musik-Vorträge und Rezitationen – musical lectures and recitations – which is exactly what we have always specialized in. It is the tradition where key experiments in the fields of inter-disciplinarity and inter-mediality have taken place – not in a sterile laboratory, but in a public space open to everyone.
VK: From today’s perspective, Cage and many of his contemporaries are being critiqued for appropriating practices of the Global South. As artists from Central Asia, how do you see this? Is there perhaps an element of reclaiming in turning to these practices?
RJ: For us, Krëlex people, there is an element of reclaiming in everything we create. When we saw the advent of “the new rich” after 1991, we found ourselves in the shoes of those whom Zygmunt Bauman (1998) called “the new poor.” When you are a half-breed and not a part of this or that particular national history – which means that you do not inherit anything – cultural treasures can only be looted. That is why we question the power of genealogy to distribute symbolic capital and do not share the belief that only a birthright grants access to a cultural tradition. We have never tried to conceal the fact that we are pirates. When your sense of belonging is undermined, the entirety of human cultures becomes foreign, and therefore subject to appropriation. In any case, piracy was the only way for us to get at least some education in the field.[3] And our motto has always been Michel Serres’s words that “it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate.”[4]
MV: Having said that, we do not mean that cultural appropriation is not a problem – it’s been a huge problem since Columbus – we are just trying to justify our own borrowings and appropriations.
RJ: As is the case with many non-European artists, we often feel obliged to make art that is rooted in our local history, while it does not surprise anyone that internationally renowned artists draw from the entire global cultural archive. In the history of Modernism, it is a well-documented rule from which it would be difficult to find exceptions. Modernism in Europe was a by-product of colonial conquest and its attendant ethnographies, and in this sense it was less a European than a global phenomenon, for it was literally made of captured materials. If we can make space here for a lengthy quote from Kenneth Coutts-Smith:
The process of co-option and appropriation was extraordinarily rapid and complete, beginning jointly, and perhaps hesitantly, with Degas and Whistler staking out claims on the Japanese, and with Gauguin grasping first the ‘primitive’ of Breton folk art, then that of Melanesia, the pattern was set. Every artist, from the most significant members of the cenacle at Le Lapin Agile to the most obscure dauber in the Place du Tertre, attempted to secure for himself some sort of cultural territory to exploit. Within thirty to forty years not one corner of non-European culture remained untouched as a source of imagery: either, geographically, the most obscure tribal totem or, temporally, the most shadowy Celtic dolman and palaeolithic cave. (Coutts-Smith 1991: 15-16).
The conquest and the cross-pollination caused by it were prerequisites for the cultural innovations of Romanticism and Modernism – as Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism taught us a lot about.
MV: This is the reason why we keep insisting that Modernism in general was a result of creolization – just look at Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. And maybe Cage, just like us, was facing this task of re-composing cultural genealogies, which lead him from tonality to modality, from Schönberg’s dodecaphony to percussion and aleatoric music, and eventually to the “anti-Beethovenian” idea that the foundational element of music should not be sound but duration.
RJ: As all creative innovators, he was navigating within a multitude of cultural traditions wherein Daisetsu Suzuki might be important, but so was Henri Thoreau. And Zen Buddhism, of course, was a thing for the whole cultural generation in the West, so it’s difficult to view Yoko Ono or Nam June Paik as rightful heirs and their friends as appropriators.
VK: How does your Central Asian identity inform your sound practice? Are you inspired in any way by the soundscapes or the sound culture of Kazakhstan?
MV: Somehow the “Central Asian Identity” has been haunting contemporary art from the region since forever. The idea of Krëlex was our attempt – even though a futile one – to escape this agenda, to problematize territorial divisions of cultures modelled after state delineations. Central Asia, as a totality of our living experience in the region, has informed, of course, our artistic practice, but it’s hard to say in what ways exactly.
RJ: In this respect the question of “what would Kazakh soundscapes be like” is an interesting one. A wind over the steppe and the roar of the cosmodrome? Mine were composed mostly of the sounds of industrial suburbs of Almaty, of the city’s parks and rivers, of the old tapes that I was discovering in my grandma’s house, of a couple of record shops, of the radio programs by Eugene Bychkov[5], Seva Novgorodtsev[6] and Andrei Gorokhov[7], and of the archives of Kazakh State Radio where my mother would often take me when I was a child.
MV: Include here the habitual repertoire of theatrical and musical venues in Almaty and that will be the sound environment we were part of.
RJ: Soundscapes of Central Asia are still waiting for researchers and can be a rich source of inspiration for experimental artists. Although the Krëlex zentre has always tended to examine something distant rather than close, our immediate sonic environment still must have been the determining factor. Perhaps auditory experience is indeed especially important in our region, which wasn’t part of the “Guttenberg Galaxy” due to nomadic way of living that prioritizes orality. A remarkable article “East. Radio. Zhambyl” by Yuri Murashov explains how, during the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet Central Asia became the zone of “secondary orality,” where acoustic communication remained the principal modality of social relations and political governance, and how radio became the key medium of territorial conquest and Sovietization.
MV: State Radio was probably the first modern cultural institution in Kazakhstan, predating institutions such as the Opera House or Conservatory by more than a decade. Perhaps Ruth should be the one to tell more, since her mother worked there for around forty years.
RJ: Yes, but my visits to the Radio mostly happened in childhood. Later I participated in other sonic scenes in Almaty: in the underground punk scene in late 1980s and early 1990s, in the Almatinian rock club that opened in the summer of 1990, in the first techno clubs and raves in the late 1990s, with experimental DJ-ing and sound making that existed around the [antiparty gang] collective, with Almatinian DJs like Kostya Timoshenko and Bazhanov Brothers. There must be a lot of interesting things happening there today, especially if we talk about the bUlt queer techno scene, with a new generation of DJs and sound artists like Medina Bazargali, Kokonja and qazaq indie.
VK: Many of your sound performances include your own poetry, for example, the album Spiritual Creaks or the video Sermon of the Rainbow. Texts in general seem to play a very significant role in your practice. Does it have something to do with the literariness and the literature-centricity of Soviet culture?
RJ: No, it has to do with our belief that texts possess magical powers. When enacted, they are capable of enchanting and bewitching, redistributing agency and establishing connections with the inexistent. Inscribing sound into a text and performing text back into a sound is the trans-medial process of conjuring realities.
MV: Both of us had been writing before we met, and our initial attempts to perform together were mostly about reading/reciting/singing poetry with music.
RJ: During that time we translated Steve Maccaffery’s article “Sound Poetry: A Survey” from 1978. It was one of the important sources in our research, among other discoveries made in the UbuWeb archives. It still amazes me how sound poetry remains a somewhat marginal field despite the fact that it played a pivotal role in early avantgarde performances. So, performing texts – be they poems, notations, scores, scripts, lectures, or just anecdotes – has always been a way for us to remain a mini-cabaret, to be able to hybridize different genres and employ a variety of media. Our visual works are often text-based in a similar way.
MV: In 2019 we organized a group show in Almaty called Bla-bla-lab: Art as Writing with twenty artists reflecting on how texts and writings are used in contemporary art. We like to view every text as a potential score, which can be actualized through enactment and thus transmutate into another media.
VK: You write your poetic text predominantly in Russian and, as far I know, not in Kazakh, including when it comes to more sound-poetic works. The sound of Sermon of the Rainbow also alludes to Russian Orthodox recitation. Can you say a few words about the legacy of Russian and Soviet colonialism and how it is reflected in your work?
MV: We ourselves are the living legacy of Russian and Soviet colonialism (although there is a lot of confusion due to equating Sovietization and colonialism).
RJ: The idea of Krëlex people – as a nascent form of “non-identity” constructed bottom-up rather than top-down – was our response to the question of the colonial past. Trying to introduce Caribbean discourse on creolization to Central Asia, we translated excerpts from Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation into Russian, and it didn’t seem strange to us that the original was in French, that Caribbean creole literature is mostly francophone. Nonetheless the idea that contemporary art and literature in Kazakhstan is created in Kazakh is somewhat ubiquitous, just as much as the idea that every person must belong to a certain location, speak a certain language, and fit into a certain box in the classification system. This view is a result of the mass ethnicization and genderization of people that became worldwide standards of governance, and it is exactly what Krëlex is supposed to offer an alternative for.
MV: As for Sermon of the Rainbow: this is a kind of “LGBT propaganda,”[8] so no wonder it mocks the biblical Sermon of the Mount and Orthodox recitation.
RJ: Be that as it may, contemporary Kazakhstani culture has been to a large extent Russophone, and we think that it is right to claim the Russian language as part of our national heritage instead of seeing it as an exclusive property of the Russian empire. Imperial cultures and languages never belong to an empire alone. Russophony does not turn people into Russians or pro-Russians. Krëlex-like tactics of resistance everywhere in the world have been all about the appropriation of imperial symbols and tools, and transforming them into something specifically local. At the time when we were reading Glissant, the idea of creolization seemed like a perfect fit and even the only possible way to position our mixed origins and convoluted family histories within the diversity of Central Asian ethnicities and cultures. However, since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this utopia of the “world-in-creolization” has been losing relevance. Perhaps such a futuristic vision of “creolized humanity” can only become a peacetime inspiration. Today, in the time of war, it makes more sense to tactically support every small nationalist movement able to confront the ongoing expansion of Russian neo-fascism. In this regard, we remain faithful to Lenin’s militant precepts: weak and oppressed nationalisms should be instrumentalized in the common anti-imperialist struggle, while strong and oppressive ones have no right to exist.
VK: In your recent work and interviews you often describe your works as post-socialist. Could you elaborate on that a bit? What does post-socialism sound like?
RJ: This relates to the previous question: we picked up the word “post-socialism” as a substitute or a counterpart to the word “postcolonialism” because we had hard times transferring the postcolonial conceptual framework to the former Soviet territories.[9] We were introduced to the academic discussion around the topic by our friends and amazing researchers Lesia Pagulich and Tatsiana Schurko, who work on a conceptual revision of the term.[10] This revision differs from the traditional understanding in that it renders post-socialism a global condition – just as much as postcolonialism, but from the perspective of the former Second World. It overcomes the spatial and temporal boundaries of the former socialist camp and becomes applicable to a multitude of anti-capitalist practices all over the world – in the past, in the present, in the future, and perhaps in other temporalities.
MV: It’s telling that the former Second World has remained a blind spot within the Western postcolonial discourse, with the implication that the postcolonial condition is somehow universal. Post-socialism is a way to talk about coloniality after the so-called “Socialist camp,” the disappearance of which is not equivalent to the complete victory of the opposing “Capitalist camp.” The idea is not to reduce this post-socialist framing to the legacies of international alliances led by the Soviet Union, but also to include other forms of state and non-state, self-organized implementations of socialist ideas throughout the world. For example, in Africa thirty-five countries out of fifty-three proclaimed themselves socialist at some point in their history (Pitcher and Askew 2006).
RJ: Thinking outside of factual history can be liberating, for it enables us to address a variety of anti-capitalist projects, whether implemented or not. Following this line of thought, we imagine post-socialism as a fragmented non-linear temporality that is at odds with the unifying straight time and reproductive logic of global capitalism. Being itself a plurality of experiences, post-socialism resembles a potentially endless mixtape where various epochs and places, both real and imaginary, constitute an inconsistent collection of sound objects, something like our old mixtape Roots Up! which was compiled to illustrate the heterogeneity of Kazakh pre- and post-socialist experiences. There you can hear a piece by Claude Debussy performed by Eduard Artemyev on the legendary synthesizer EMS Synthi 100, a Kazakh radio program from the 1980s about the origins of Kazakh music, voices of William Burroughs and Iggy Pop telling a story of Hassan-I-Sabbah discovering Europe, “diasporic” songs by Ghédalia Tazartès echoing improvisations of Kazakh traditional akyns, field recordings by Alan Lomax following ethnomusical studies by Alexandr Zataevich, and so on …
VK: Another prominent theme in your work is posthumanism and new materialism: for example the video series Actor-Network Theatre or the sound installation Inhuman Rights Watch & Listen. Where does this interest come from?
RJ: Our emphasis on the imaginary and unreal outlines a strange ontological position, which is not explicitly stated but rather vaguely implied.[11] Looking back at what has been said so far – mentioning the inexistent, the imaginary, the transmutation of media, the enchantment, the conjuring of realities, and so on – it becomes clear that we are moving in line with a kind of feminist and decolonial critique of Modernity, at least of some modernist assumptions about categories like “human,” “reality,” “society,” etc. The way we describe the Krëlex zentre – a paranormal institution[12] dealing with ghostly matters such as communication between the real and the unreal – already sets our agenda in relation to a pluralist relational ontology loosely based on new materialist ideas.[13] It is a worldview that has the principle of the indistinguishability of matter and meaning at its core; it denies positivist dualisms like nature vs. culture, recognizes the social forces of ghosts and other non-humans, leaves space for political spell-casting and household queer magic, and advocates a non-essentialist and ecological view on how art and knowledge are understood and produced today. Under the rubric of “Actor-Network,” this ontology serves as a toolkit for experimenting with the ways our reality is conceptualized, a means for re-composing the world (following Latour’s proposal to replace the old “critique” with the new “compositionism”). A lot has already been said about the Actor-Network Theory, being not a theory but rather a practice similar to an artistic one (Halsall 2020). We re-interpreted this idea for our own purposes and called it Actor-Network Theatre, transmuting it from an academic methodology to a performative device for conjuring realities. And let’s not forget that theatre as such has always been a device for conjuring realities, which works by means of performing texts, be they dramatic, musical, poetic, or otherwise. This kind of ontological theatre is our alchemist lab where nothing is pregiven and everything is enacted. This may be one of the most important corollaries of this approach: realities are multiple and only come to being through enactment.
MV: I’m not sure about these theoretical foundations; for me it was more a way to use everyday objects as puppetry.
RJ: Exactly, a theatre of objects. Our Actor-Network Theater is an application of material semiotics, which basically means that relations between material objects are somewhat similar to relations between narrative units in a text. There is a structural resemblance that can become obvious when you see/hear actors or musicians on stage performing, that is, transforming their scripts into sound and movement. This is why we say in the beginning that sound can be either written or performed and that the transformation of sound into text and back again should be seen as mystical transmutations capable of conjuring something inexistent into being. There is nothing esoteric in this statement, it’s just a material-semiotic observation of the way art affects the material world.
MV: Actually, the fantasy of an imaginary organization named Inhuman Rights Watch & Listen came about as a reflection on the fact that the rhetoric of human rights is inherently limited due to the known exclusiveness of the concept of human.[14] For the exhibition Human Rights: 20 Years After, organized by the renowned Kazakhstani curator Valeria Ibraeva, we made a sound installation where a comfortable armchair with headphones was facing a barred window. Outside the barred window hung a group of soft plush toys – animals that Masha has resewn as weird monsters – holding small banners with the texts “Let Us In!,” “Too Few Humans Among Us,” and “We Are The Good Cats.” The headphones played a looped 24-minute mixtape consisting of diverse sound material, mostly voices of various entities, biological and spiritual. The overall idea was to invite listeners to reflect on how the foundational binaries of Modernity – such as human/non-human, nature/culture, inside/outside – are constructed and justified.
VK: What new sound projects do you have in the works? What directions do you want to explore?
RJ: Intermedially speaking, every project is a sound project to a certain extent!
MV: I think this can be an interesting direction to explore!