Krill.Foam.Stop Time to Listen

Water as a habitat is as vital as it is unfathomable, polluted by sound, chemicals and plastic, and ever resonant with the threat of drowning.

The soundscape of inhalation and exhalation contains a compressed account of our present age; the quavers of speech resound with the audible rhythm of the power to survive. Foam makes bubbles, grows into multiform shapes, and collapses. Foam bubbles mushroom and burst. When is foam toxic, and when not? A voice whirrs between air and water, interwoven with an imaginary habitat. Fishing for sounds with a hydrophone, the singer morphs the other-than-human voices and her singing voice into an incorporeal technological soundscape with a metallic quality.

During an evening of interdisciplinary, feminist performance with voice, speech, sound, water, foam, an aquarium and hydrophones, voice performer and composer Ute Wassermann, composer and writer Nina Dragičević and writer and performer Anna Hetzer explore toxic questions: “Should the artist produce time?”, “Could it be that our present has long since foamed over?”, “Does the voice remain human, or does it become something Other?”

Ute Wassermann: Krill (2023, premiere) for solo performer and aquarium

On behalf of the Akademie der Künste, sponsored by Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House

Anna Hetzer: Schaum. Ein Cybertrip durch den Garten Erde (2022), performance

Nina Dragičević: Stop (2021) for solo performer and water bowl

The concert is part Time to Listen festival of the Akademie der Künste as well as the Month of contemporary Music Berlin and the Moabit “Ortstermin” arts festival.