The simple phrase, »To live is to tremble«, contains both fragility and defiance. It acknowledges that every form of life vibrates – physically, emotionally, politically. Trembling is not weakness; it is the body’s way of reacting to the world.
In this video piece for sixteen bells, trembling becomes sound, structure, and stance. Bells are instruments of alarm and celebration, of mourning and gathering, of warning and awakening. They resonate beyond their physical bodies, sending vibrations into the air that touch us whether we want them to or not. Each bell trembles differently; each carries its own memory of ritual, labour, resistance, and loss.
»To Live Is to Tremble«, unfolds as a field of resonances – overlapping, colliding, amplifying, cancelling. Sixteen distinct sources of vibration form a shared, unstable sonic terrain. The bells do not mark time, they do not offer harmony – they expose tensions. Their tremors move between precision and unpredictability, between order and rupture, between the intimate and the overwhelming.
In a world where people, societies, and landscapes are shaken daily – by violence, displacement, political cynicism, economic brutality – the tremble of a bell is not merely a musical or sonic gesture. It is an echo of human bodies under pressure. »To Live Is to Tremble« asks us to inhabit that trembling: to stay with the instability, to hear vulnerability as resonance, to recognise that the shaking of the world passes through our own bodies.
To live is to tremble. And perhaps to tremble together is the beginning of resistance.
The work was created in collaboration with Gunilla Sköld Feiler. Dror Feiler is a 2025/26 Music & Sound fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin-Program.