In Choir of Kin, the collective Transformative Narratives invited the audience to partake in an immersive audiovisual experience. The installation, together with a performance that commenced from March 14-16th, saw the voices of various life forms merge in a fictional habitat. Explorative sounds reverberating in this intricate scenery cherished the get-together of human and non-human collaborators in a multi-species affair.
The piece roots in the collective’s inquiries into symbiosis, entanglement of landscapes, and sympoietic world-building. Queer understandings of kinship are applied to research in ecology, biology, and music theory. Practices of active listening and engagement with beyond-human agencies form crucial methodologies.
Sonic and textual interventions by the human performers met sound creations generated from data by non-human life. Inhabiting the Grey Space at brut, the artists formed a choir with the scenery they sonically interact with. This Choir of Kin acted as a resilient yet dissonant defense system for dealing with environmental and generational trauma.
Credits:
Lena Kuzmich
Direction, concept development, artistic direction, stage concept, costume concept, production, installation, text, visuals, performance, electronics, vocals
Tony Wagner
Direction, concept development, artistic and musical direction, performance and music concept, production, installation, composition, text, performance, violin, vocals
Karolina Preuschl
Concept development, composition, text, performance, piano, modular synthesizer, vocals
Hyeji Nam
Concept development, composition, text, performance, piano, synthesizer, vocals
Miriam Adefris
Harp, composition, performance, vocals
Christina Ruf
Cello, composition, performance, vocals
Melinda Franzke
Double bass, composition, performance, vocals
Mother Cell (Jack Brenner, Mason Wilson, Sam Whitlaw)
(Mis)Guided Meditation. Edit for Choir of Kin by Jack Brenner
Melissa Antunes de Menezes
Head of production
Leo Kuraitė
Light design and technics
Barbara Urbanic
Horticulture, set design
Georg Hampe
Stage design
amaaenaStudio, Yi-Jing Chen – Growing with Garments
Costume
Parnia Sarraf @aetna.club
Head of Make-up
Cameron Lee Felton @aetna.club
Make-up assistance
Rein van der Woerd, Marwin Nehl, Peter Arnold
Electronics, coding
Ipek Hamzaoglu
Video documentation
Marcella Ruiz Cruz
Photo documentation
Lennart Horst
Text
Tiger Dingsun
Graphic design
Scientific collaborators
Joshua Lawrence (Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK), Alberto Scarampi (Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK), Artscience Lab Forms Lab, The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL), Photosynthetic Device: Dr. Paolo Bombelli (Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK)
Sponsoring of Reishi mushroom installation and support in the research process
Mushroom Research Center Austria
A co-production of imagetanz 2024/brut Wien and Transformative Narratives.
With the kind support of the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs, SKE, Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport.
Development of this project was supported by the European Media Art Platform in the framework of a research residency at Antre Peaux, France