Resynthesising the Traditional: Unstable Hallucinations

Stefan Fraunberger »Quellgeister #4: Kuruzenaufstand«

21:00

Dania »Replica – Relic«

21:50

Marcin Pietruszewski & Lukas de Clerck »Oto Aulos«

22:50

Free entry

This evening brings together works that oeuvre along the gaps – in distortion, uncertainty, and narratives omitted within idealised versions of the past. Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerk explore the ancient Greco-Roman aulos that epitomises an exalted and unraveled state; Dania’s speculative research sonically reanimates Mesopotamian museum artefacts to imagine a soundscape of southern Iraq without colonial interference; Stefan Fraunberger’s long-term research on Transylvania’s relic pipe organs highlights material processes that have stretched beyond the instruments’ convoluted histories and nature-culture battlefields. Here, idealised versions of the past are distorted into unstable hallucinations.

Stefan Fraunberger »Quellgeister #4: Kuruzenaufstand«

»Quellgeister« (roughly translated as »source spirits«) is the name of the musical cycle that the composer Stefan Fraunberger has been developing on dilapidated pipe organs in abandoned fortress churches in Transylvania for over 25 years. Once built by German communities who subsequently fled the country during Romanian communist rule, the organs were left to the wilderness like stranded spaceships. Fraunberger sees these instruments in the liminal areas beyond nature and culture. His recordings focus not on preservation, but rather on speculation and the possibilities of new beginnings, as he considers the identity of objects as they become less tied to human significance. Each number of »Quellgeister« refers to a different deteriorated pipe-organ in a different transylvanian village – for this performance we will hear the newest iteration »Quellgeister #4: Kuruzenauftstand« accompanied by images of the decaying interiors and frescoes of the churches, morphed by machine learning.

Dania »Replica – Relic«

With »Replica – Relic,« Dania explores an alternative approach to repatriation. Without consent from the British Museum, the artist surreptitiously took 3D scans of several Mesopotamian artifacts – items »acquired« from her homeland of southern Iraq. These scans became the blueprints for a series of reconstructed sculptures, enhanced with interactive sensors that allow her to reanimate the sonic memories embedded within each object. During her performance, Dania activates these sculptures as instruments, creating a long-form composition that spectrally resurrects the voices, resonances, and ecological memory of a landscape that has been systematically erased. Working with an ancient Mesopotamian tuning system that was documented on cuneiform tablets, alongside years of field recordings gathered from a distance, she imagines a sound world of southern Iraq unadulterated by colonial interference.

Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerck »Oto Aulos«

»Oto Aulos« by Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerck is a new composition for aulos and computer, using machine listening and machine processing techniques to transform the aulos’s live signal into a dynamically spatialised hybrid real-time environment. The aulos is an ancient Greco-Roman double-reeded pipe instrument, extinct for over a millennium and for which we have no sonic records. Through years of reconstruction through obsessive reed-making and experimental design, de Clerck has been seeking a contemporary reinvention of the instrument that turns historical speculation into sonic research, where microtonality, psychoacoustics, and shifting textures form a living vocabulary. Plugging into these acoustics, Pietruszewski sculpts precise yet volatile architectures of tone, probing how synthetic form translates into physical vibration. The aulos is thus reimagined as a shifting, contested sound technology whose mythic legacy resonates with today’s fractured sonic landscape.

Transgressive Memory Festival

The evening is part of Transgressive Memory Festival 2026, organized by Körber Stiftung during the Berlin Art Week on the weekend of 12 and 13 September at Silent Green. The festival invites us to step into a new terrain of remembrance, where media art, performance, and critical discourse meet to challenge how, why, and by whom the past is told. It proposes transgressive memory as both method and principle, as mode of remembrance that unsettles institutionalised rituals, dissolves the border between documentary and fiction, and acknowledges the complicity of technology in shaping collective consciousness. Drawing on grammars of the digital, its glitches, loops, and new forms of archives and networks, artists and cultural practitioners are reconfiguring the aesthetics of remembrance. Their works mobilise image, code, and sound as insurgent languages that break open linear temporalities and establish spaces of multiplicity, contradiction, and ghostly return. Here, commemoration is no longer about the preservation of fact, but about the activation of relation between bodies and databases, absence and algorithm, personal encounter, and public witness. 

Full festival programme

• Dania
• Stefan Fraunberger
• Marcin Pietruszewski
• Lukas de Clerck

Curated by CTM Festival and Stas Shärifullà on invitation of Körber-Stitfung / Transgressive Memory Festival. »Oto Aulos« is a co-production by CTM festival with Sonic Acts Biennale, Amsterdam; Ultima Festival, Oslo; and Archipel Festival, Geneva.

Silent Green
Gerichtstraße 35
13347 Berlin
 

Silent Green Betonhalle is fully accessible. The performances this evening will take place with loud volumes. Hearing protection will be available at the door/bar.

Youth 16–18 years of age can join events that end before midnight, unaccompanied by an adult. Under 16s are only allowed entry when accompanied by a legal guardian.

Persons taking public transit may check the current status of elevators at the subway stops nearest each venue, via the BVG (both in German and English).