Villa Serpentara Fellowship 2025

Vita

Hristina Šušak has been composing since the age of eight. At 17, she began her studies in composition and music theory at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, which she completed with Iris ter Schiphorst and Gesine Schröder. She completed her master class studies with Mark Andre in Dresden. Her works have been performed worldwide, including by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, at the Biennale di Venezia, the Paris Fashion Week, the ECLAT Festival, in the Kioi Hall in Tokyo and by the MDR Symphony Orchestra, Arditti Quartet, Vokalsolisten Stuttgart, etc. She is also active as a performance artist. In 2019 she took part in a workshop by Marina Abramović. Since 2023 she teaches music theory at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Residency

I see my compositions as statements that explore psychological and philosophical themes. With a minimalist material structure and undulating structures, I strive for dynamic developments that reinterpret traditional parameters such as tone pitch and rhythm. Instruments and voices merge into a coherent unit, whereby the musicians are also integrated physically and performatively through the use of their voices.

During my residency, I would like to develop a new orchestral piece that explores further the above aspects. The orchestra should function as a unit and a corpus, whereby the timbre strives towards a universal form and detaches itself from the materialistic sound of individual instruments.