The opening panel of the festival offers a space for dialogue with participating artists, focusing on their musical ideas as well as their lived experiences and working conditions. »Art has no gender, but artists do« – this insight, articulated by art critic and activist Lucy Lippard in the 1970s, was a key argument in feminist art theory’s demand for greater visibility and recognition of women artists in a male-dominated art world. In slightly varied form, Lippard’s statement serves as the title of an article by Julia Eckhardt on gender specificity in music and sound art, in which she highlights how this asymmetrical dynamic continues to shape the music world today. How, then, do gender roles, identities, and the settings and circumstances of creative practice influence musical concepts and strategies? Building on this question, the discussion will explore the current living and working conditions of the participating artists with a focus on the challenges they face today – especially the uncertainties and threats stemming from the many ongoing crises and conflicts, and not least, from the current conservative backlash.

Sara Abazari is a composer and music theorist whose work explores historical musical periods and the relationship between music and society. She studied piano and composition in Tehran and Cologne, and earned a PhD in music theory from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with a disser- tation on »Music and Power in Iran«. Until 2022, she served as Professor of Composition at the University of Tehran, where she founded the Center for Contemporary Music.

Anahita Abbasi is an Iranian composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. She studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) and at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to her compositional work, she curates concerts, serves as a juror for composition competitions, and is a founding member of both the Schall- feld Ensemble and the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA). She currently lives in Germany and Paris.

Chikiss aka Galina Ozeran is a Belarusian-born singer, composer and producer, based in Berlin. Embracing music as an ongoing artistic journey, she has evolved from her roots in post-punk and experimental rock to a distinctive sound that blends synth-pop, minimalist electronics, and electro-acoustic textures. Galina Ozeran has released numerous albums and collaborated on various projects with artists including Dorit Chrysler and Plattenbau.

Yara Mekawei is a sonic sculptor and sound artist whose practice explores the intersection of sound, architecture, and urban landscapes. Her work transforms the rhythms of cities into immersive auditory experiences, where sonic narratives merge with visual form. Grounded in extensive research, Yara Mekawei bridges antiquity and modernity, drawing from Sufi philosophy and »The Book of the Dead« to create compositions that resonate with memory, identity, and cultural heritage. Her work dissolves the boundaries between past, present, and sonic visions.

Brigitta Muntendorf is a composer whose interdisciplinary work spans instrumental, orchestral and choral settings. She develops new concepts such as radical listening and environmental storytelling, and her artistic research explores fields such as 3D audio and AI voice cloning. Her works have been presented at leading international music festivals. She is the founder and former artistic director of Ensemble Garage. In this year she will assume the role of Artistic Director of the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen in Hanover.

Sarah Nemtsov’s music captivates through sensitively constructed setups, complex and energetic textures, layered musical structures, and interactions between acoustic instruments and electronics. Sarah Nemtsov’s works are performed at internationally renowned festivals. She has received numerous awards. She is a member of both the Saxon Academy of Arts and the Berlin Academy of Arts. Since 2022, she has been Professor of Composition at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. She lives in Berlin.

Bettina Wackernagel is a curator and music theater director. She was responsible for countless world premieres, including at the Salzburger Festspiele and the Ars Electronica Linz. She has initiated festival formats that illuminate current trends in electronic music and art with social discourses. In 2014, she founded the Heroines of Sound festival. The feminist format is internationally renowned and unique in the European festival landscape.

Nele Weiher is a political scientist with a focus on political theory and the history of ideas. She completed her doctorate in gender sociology on identity formation among trans*migrants and currently works at the University of Koblenz. Her research centers on feminist political theory, queer theory, and identity formation processes within marginalized groups, with particular attention to power structures. Key areas of interest include the embodiment of social norms and gendered relations of violence, examined within the context of enduring colonial power and knowledge structures.

As early as the 1960s, Pauline Oliveros placed listening at the center of composition. »Deep Listening« and »Sonic Meditations«, developed by Oliveros, are practices of communal listening and music-making whose political implications have become particularly evident in light of today’s societal regression. These practices challenge the male-coded cult of genius as well as the entrenched structures of high culture and academic music – structures that continue to contribute to the marginalization of women in music today. At the same time, Oliveros’ concepts rank among the key avant-garde ideas that continue to resonate with a wide public. Related to this thematic field are explorations of the posthuman, of nature and its sounds, and the processes of falling asleep to music, experiences that guide us toward stillness and a return to a kind of natural state. The interdisciplinary research project Lullabyte, which investigates such processes, was at the center of the festival’s first two days. Chilean electronic artist Darla Quintana works with extraterrestrial sounds, incorporating audio recordings from outer space realized by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory into her rhythmically complex compositions. Annika Tudeer and Yiran Zhao explain the artistic strategies employed by the ensemble OBLIVIA to transform the current moment – when the impacts of human-induced climate change are becoming tangibly real – into a »Big Bang of Reality«.

Miriam Akkermann is a musicologist and sound artist. She earned her PhD in musicology from the Berlin University of the Arts and completed her habilitation at the University of Bayreuth. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century music, computer music and music technology, digital musicology, performance practice, and music archiving. As part of the Lullabyte project, she investigates the effects of music and sound on sleep. Since April 2024, she holds the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Kim Feser [no pronoun or »she«] is a musicologist, philosopher, and sociologist who lectures both at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts. Kim Feser’s research focus includes the interrelation of aesthetic, technical, and social dimensions of music; intersections of experimental avant-garde, sound art, pop, and club music; history of synthesizers and sequencers; philosophy of music. Since 2023 Kim Feser is Project Secretary of the interdisciplinary European research network Lullabyte.

Darla Quintana is a producer and performer of electronic music based in Santiago de Chile. Her work moves between ambient, downtempo and minimal techno, distinguished by a refined sound aesthetic, where simplicity and the reduction of elements give shape to structures that evolve gradually, seeking to capture the essence of the sound with clarity and precision. She also pursues interdisciplinary research into the multiple applications of sound across fields such as astronomical science, audiovisual media, dance, gastronomy, architecture, and performance art.

Annika Tudeer is an award-winning performance artist and the artistic director and co-founder of the performance collective OBLIVIA. With a background as a dancer, choreographer, and performer, she also worked as a dance and performance critic after completing an MA in literature at the University of Helsinki. Annika Tudeer has written extensively on emerging trends in the performing arts, contributing to a broader understanding of the European dance and performance landscape. OBLIVIA has been creating genre- defying performances for over two decades, merging movement, dance, language, sound, light, and gesture into a distinctive minimalist aesthetic.

Yiran Zhao is a composer and performer based in Berlin. She currently serves as music director and composer for the performance collective OBLIVIA. Her work explores various modes of artistic expression, incorporating both musical and performative elements, lighting, visual art, and other media. Since moving to Europe, she has developed a deep interest in the physicality of performance, working extensively with the human body and physical objects as compositional material. Yiran Zhao’s music has been featured by leading ensembles and at festivals worldwide.

Music is not only a time-based art, but also a physical and performative one. Classical instrumental music demands discipline and precise control over the body’s physical processes. But with the advent of electronic sound production, a fundamentally new situation has emerged – one that profoundly shifts the relationship to the body. Electronic sounds offer musicians a new freedom of movement and expression. At the same time, their performances open up new real and imaginary musical spaces for the audience, transforming how we hear and how we see. The focus of this last panel is on the new possibilities enabled by technological advancements – both in the use of traditional and electronic instruments, and in the development of specific musical and physical actions and forms of expression.

Keynote: Performance, Body & Electronic Materialities
This keynote explores performances by FLINTA sound artists who expose the visceral dimensions of technology. In resistance to the dominance of sleek, disembodied interfaces – the sound from nowhere – these artists foreground the entangled interactions of body, space, and machine. Their body-signal choreographies disrupt linear temporalities, logical syntax, and the seemingly self-evident mechanisms of music performance. Through these embodied practices, new sonic systems emerge, forging dialogues between flesh, machine, and sound.

Alexandra Cárdenas is a composer, live coder, and sound artist from Bogotá, Colombia. Her work explores the intersection of code, sound, and improvisation, using live coding as a medium for real-time composition, performance, and sonic experimentation. Alexandra Cárdenas studied composition at Los Andes University in Bogotá and earned a Master’s degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts from the Berlin University of the Arts. She incorporates programming, extended reality (XR), and artificial intelligence (AI) as core elements of her creative process.

Camilla Milena Fehér is a choreographer, composer, dancer, and musician. She studied improvisation and composition at Codarts Rotterdam and completed her Master of Arts, Performance and Theater at DasArts in Amsterdam. Until 2021, she was active as part of the performance duo Skills, with productions at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin and Kampnagel in Hamburg. Since 2023, she has been working as a sound choreographer and performer with the theater collective Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen (PKRK).

Lottie Sebes is a sound artist and researcher whose work investigates historical entanglements between humans and machines. Through performance and installation, Sebes examines how power structures manifest in our technologies. Her work has been presented internationally, including at Elsewhere Living Museum (USA), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (AU), iMAL (BE), and iii (NL). Her writings have been published in Sonic Scope, Echo, and in her solo multimedia publication and record »Veritas Ventriloquist«.

Augustė Vickunaitė is a sound experimenter with a background in physics. Using vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders, she creates layered compositions from found material, field recordings, voice, instruments, objects, and the malfunctions of decaying technology. Known for her theatrical, darkly humorous approach to tape music and noise, she has performed throughout Europe at venues including Cafe Oto in London. She recently released her first solo CD, Dance Alone, and is preparing for an upcoming residency at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm.

Viola Yip is a composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and instrument builder from Hong Kong. Her practice centers on the creation of unconventional, self-built instruments, as well as compositions and performances that explore the complex, dynamic relationships between materiality, media, space, the human body, and the machine body – all through the lens of sound. Her work has recently been presented at venues including Issue Project Room New York, City Hong Kong Arts Center, and the Pinakothek der Moderne München.