Ghost in the Cell

In a world that seems to be getting more and more crazy, in which art becomes consumption, science becomes politics, comfort becomes control, one wonders whether thoughts, feelings and intentions still belong to oneself or whether one has long since become a pure product of the emerging environment.

Where social media develop a frightening momentum of their own, which is reflected on an international level, by over time literally penetrating the cerebral cortex of unsuspecting users, many today find themselves in a lonely, personalized cell in the consciousness prison.

We wonder how – alongside so many others – we have slipped into this. Did we put ourselves  in this cell, did we lock ourselves in from the inside and then threw the key away?

Art, and music in particular, has always had something like this discarded key. Because confinement within narrow boundaries, as oppressive as it may be, has the potential for transformation.

This project takes reduction as its subject and is a search out of the “cell”. By consciously setting limits, we can express something limitless in them. The famous concept piece by Frederic Rzewski “Coming Together” is something like a framework for this. Through the process of “de-composition”, components are isolated and reassembled in music practice. The reductionist approach of minimal music serves as a guideline, which is supplemented and expanded by electronic means.

Through constant repetitions that gradually change, a flow is created in which the impressive texts by Sam Melville and Merab Kostava are embedded. The way in which the texts are recited is primarily musical, the content can be understood semantically as well as unconsciously.

In this we invite the audience to go on this journey with us and look at the world behind the bars of fixed norms, expectations and dependencies.