Resynthesising the Traditional is a long-term initiative co-curated by Stas Shärifulla and CTM Festival, that explores how musicians, sound artists, and researchers can critically engage with traditions and heritage. Evoking resynthesis – a processing method in computer music that analyzes sounds to extract their fundamental components – as a guiding metaphor, it regroups commissioned works, performances, residencies, talks, and an artistic lab that resist conservative views of culture as something frozen, solidified, and generally untouchable.
At the heart of the project is the namesake artistic lab, which is designed as an open toolbox for artists exploring how to connect to »the traditional,« and is intended to help them navigate their practice outside of exoticisation, cultural essentialism, and uneven power dynamics. The lab is meant to create a space where likeminded practitioners can connect, exchange, discuss, and prototype artistic ideas. One of the lab’s goals is to identify commissioning opportunities that support a number of artists that have taken part in the lab. Following a given lab edition, fellows have the chance to apply to an internal closed call to produce new work for CTM Festival.
Theme: At the Extreme
This year’s edition of the lab invites artists and researchers whose work critically examines the ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of traditions entangled with ideas, embodiments, representations, experiences, and sensoriums of extremity. These may include intensity, transgression, transformation, marginality, outsiderness, endurance, conflict, and excess.
While such encounters are often understood through associations with noise, violence, and loud popular music, the lab invites theoretical and practical reflections on how the extreme emerges beyond these tropes – for example pointing beyond typical masculine codings of the extreme, reformulated by current queer and feminist reframing of the concept. Drawing on the related meanings of the Greek exo and Latin extra (“outside” or “external”), we approach extremity as a relational condition, chosen or imposed, produced between majoritarian centres and their minoritarian outsides, respectively between joyful, novel, and transformative potentials surrounding the extreme, and pitfalls such as rigidity, intolerance, and polarisation.
What is considered extreme, by whom, and why? What does it mean to follow a tradition to its extreme consequences, and what might those be? Who is allowed to push tradition to its limits, and whose practices are framed as inauthentic or dangerous? What does it mean to practise tradition under pressures such as war, displacement, repression, or ecological crisis? How might traditions provide ways of inhabiting extreme times, and how might extremity enable or obstruct alliances?
Preference will be given to artists and practice-based researchers engaging with technological, bodily, aesthetic, and theoretical forms at the intersection of the extreme and the traditional, particularly where these emerge in unexpected or rarely recognised ways. For further ideas and inspiration on how to engage closely with the lab's theme, we invite applicants to familiarise themselves with the work of the co-hosts Karina Utomo and Luigi Monteanni (below).
What Will Happen in the Lab?
The lab will take place over the course of seven days, with arrival and departure planned for 24 January and 1 February respectively. The lab will include:
- Theory and practice workshops by the lab co-hosts, including individual and group exercises
- Individual 15 – 20 minute oral presentations by participants (in closed format)
- Solo public performances or presentations (15 – 20 minutes) as part of a free-entry event
- Inputs from specialists (eg. artists, researchers, technologists…)
- Guided individual or group sonic improvisations
- Field trips or site visits
- Feedback sessions with lab co-hosts and curators
Following the lab, participants will also have the opportunity to propose new artistic work or research – solo or new collaborations arising from the lab – to the Resynthesising the Traditional artistic team. Selected works will be shortlisted for commission and presentation at CTM Festival in Berlin. Details including the application procedure and deadlines will be discussed during the lab.
Conditions
The call is open to artists worldwide. Applicants should have an already existing practice that ties into the lab’s focus on (re)connecting with traditional ideas and sounds through a contemporary lens and how this overlaps with »the extreme,« as well as clear ideas or questions on what next steps they would like to take in expanding this practice. Artistic approaches can range from technological or instrument-focused, to compositional, aesthetic, research-oriented or other methodologies.
Due to the international nature of the lab, a working knowledge of English is recommended. If you have any concerns about working in English please indicate this in the application form so that we can discuss and plan with you.
Up to six participants will be selected by the co-hosts Karina Utomo and Luigi Monteanni. Read more about their backgrounds and practices below the application form.
Participants will be supported with a travel budget of up to 300 euro per person, accommodation and catering for the duration of the lab, and a festival pass to CTM 2027 events. Visa fees will also be supported for artists, when required. We are able to provide selected fellows with letters of invitation for those needing them for visa or funding applications, or other professional reasons.
Following the lab, participants will also have the opportunity to propose new artistic work or research – solo or new collaborations arising from the lab – to the Resynthesising the Traditional artistic team. Up to two new works may be selected for commission and presentation at CTM Festival in Berlin during January/February 2028. More information will be sent to participants after the lab.
Schedule and Deadlines
- Application Deadline: 28 September 2026
- Selected participants announced: mid to late October 2026
- Lab week: 26 – 31 January 2027
- Public presentations: 26 January 2027
A Note on AI
We want to hear your ideas in your own voice.
What matters to us most is your artistic thinking, not elaborate application writing. We recognise the helpfulness of AI tools to help brainstorm, structure, translate, or polish applications, especially for people whose first language is not English. We are looking for your authorship and clarity of ideas – meaning your perspective, your artistic reasoning, and what genuinely drives your proposal. Applications where AI has replaced rather than supported that voice are harder for the jury to evaluate meaningfully and may not stand out.
Questions
Please send an email to resynth[at]ctm-festival.de with the subject »Resynthesising the Traditional« should you have any questions about applying.
In the application form below, we ask for a little more information about you. What's important to us is that you can demonstrate an already existing practice on combining traditional sonic ideas with contemporary forms, and that you have a clear idea of what kind of guidance or research you’d like to undertake to bring your work into a next step or phase.
Please note that this open call is for solo artists / projects only.
After filling out the form and pressing »Next,« you will be able to preview your answers before submitting.
Karina Utomo
Karina Utomo is an extreme metal vocalist, composer, collaborative artist, and beekeeper. She is the co-founder of musical projects Rinuwat, KILAT, and High Tension. Her voice practice is a coalescing movement within various genres of extreme metal, experimental, extra-normal and cross-cultural practices. Utomo has collaborated extensively across industrial, avant-garde improvisation, grindcore, and black metal genres in performance and recordings, as well as in visual art in the medium of video, sculpture and research. Her commissioned performance and visual art works have been featured at galleries and festivals, including the Korkut Sonic Arts Triennial (Tselinny Centre, KZ), MUMA (AU), National Gallery of Victoria (AU), Project 8 Gallery (AU), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (KR). Her projects have featured in festival programs such as Download Festival, Dark Mofo, and Mona Foma in Australia, and Soundrenaline Festival in Indonesia. Utomo’s 2024 residency with artist and beekeeper Nicholas Dowse in Ubud, Bali, and Majalengka, West Java, explore the bee species Apis dorsata and Apis cerana, generating artistic engagements with a focus on collective effort, cross-cultural knowledge sharing and practices involving the natural world.
Luigi Monteanni
Luigi Monteanni is a sound researcher and artist interested in the relationships between underground music communities, regional traditions, folklore, and recording practices. He is completing a PhD in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, analysing the indigenisation of extreme metal in Bandung, Indonesia, through a theory of sonic models, ecologies, and ecosystems that generate intergenre, social, and musical continuums. He is also an active member of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and has been a visiting researcher at ISBI Bandung and CRiSAP London, where he developed audio compositions documenting fields of sonic opacity and peripheral modes of listening. As a musician, he co-founded the duo Babau and the label Artetetra in 2014. Both projects explore the musical possibilities of digital folklore and internet exoticism in late globalisation under the tongue-in-cheek term »fifth world music.« He has performed and presented installations at festivals and institutions including Terraforma, UH Fest, Saturnalia, Museo Madre, MK&G Hamburg, Triennale Museum, and Club to Club, and has collaborated with artists such as Tarawangsawelas, Riar Rizaldi, Heith, and Lord Spikeheart. He has taught at SOAS, UniUrb, ISBI, UN Malang, and Roma Tre University. His chapters and articles have been published by, among others, Norient, Zer0 Books, Spiral House, CTM Magazine, Routledge, and the University of Montreal.
