© Ina Aydogan

METAMORPHOSIS//METAHUMAN - (mdw) University of Music and Performing Arts

Curated as a 4-part musical accompaniment to the 2021 Transculturality Symposium - "Contesting Border Regimes – Sound and Images" at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. From the Symposium programme: "The crisis of European border politics and current struggles against deportations and illegal push-backs from EU countries including Austria have led to various political, activist as well as artistic interventions. This transdisciplinary symposium creates a forum to address the potential of cinematic and musical politics and to look into their relation to activist practices and current research. Our goal is to bring activism, the arts and academia in contact. We want to explore, how these differing approaches interconnect in contesting contemporary border regimes and their devastating effects".

I therefore bring together 5 creatives, activists and musicians and center the narrative and creative concept of the METAHUMAN by Faris Cuchi Gezahegn . The very act of this creation and collaboration is to refuse borders, discplines and binaries through musical activism and performance.

"By connecting to ancestral knowledge that understands, manifests, and lives a life in a gender-variant way, metahuman embodies a metamorphosis that challenges the assumption of the white supremacy indoctrination which polices our bodies insidiously. METAHUMAN manifests instead in a love letter to selves, to life before and coming, poem, song, sketch and many other forms" - Faris Cuchi Gezahegn

Artists:

Miriam Adefris started playing the harp by the age of six and later studied classical harp at the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität of Vienna. During this time, she played in several orchestras, but soon began to focus more and more on contemporary music, which led to the formation of Baubo Collective, which has a strong emphasis on playing works by living composers as well as its own compositions and improvisational music. After finishing her studies, she started working as a touring manager at a renowned Viennese orchestra. However, she never completely lost track of the harp. Last year she eventually found her way back to the instrument, leaving her classical roots behind her this time and creating her own spheric universe by transcending the gap between analogue and electronic sounds.

Faris Cuchi Gezahegn is a performance artist, PCCC stand-up comedian and an intersectional LGBTIQA* advocate who uses different media such as style activism, video and audio to bring about social change and to start a conversation on the issues they face while navigating day-to-day life as a non-binary Ethiopian/African LGBTIQA* advocate/refugee in central Europe and back in their homeland Ethiopia. They have lived in Austria since 2017, having been granted asylum after their security in Ethiopia was compromised. Through their artistic practice, they were a recipient of a scholarship from an art programme of the City of Vienna via the Kültür Gemma programme for the year 2019, performed at the Wienwoche festival where art and activism meet in a performance entitled "Goddess in Diaspora" and also participated in a 10-day group exhibition organised by the Kulturen in Bewegung cultural association entitled "Queering Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony" and was part of the "Imagining Otherwise Research Lab" in Tanzquartier Wien curated by Tonica Hunter.
linktr.ee/faris.kurubooshti

Through years of concert performances and audio and video recordings, Dora Deliyska has gained international acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Her extensive repertoire ranges from Bach to Ligeti. Her self-developed artistic projects bring together different composers, spanning the history of music. These conceptual programmes have their own dramaturgy and cast a unique perspective on piano literature and the art of interpretation. Deliyska performs regularly in prestigious concert halls such as the Vienna Musikverein, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Belgium), the Oosterpoort Music Centre (Netherlands), the Bulgaria Concert Hall, and many other venues in Europe. She also performs regularly in various countries in Asia (including China, Thailand, Vietnam, Qatar) and in South America and gives master classes at renowned music institutions.
doradeliyska.com

Born in 1996 in Vienna, Ganaël Dumreicher is an Austrian/Luxembourgish sonic artist, composer and filmmaker. As a student of the electronic musician Philippe "Chook" Schirrer he made his first experiments in the field of electroacoustic music at the age of 15. His recent work focuses on hybrid forms of digital and analogue media. Ganaël is currently studying at the Lehrgang for Electroacoustic and Experimental Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.
instagram.com/ganael_gana

Ciara Moser was born 1996 in Dublin, Ireland. As a multitalented blind musician playing several instruments she dedicated herself to her real love, the bass guitar, at the age of fourteen. In May 2018 Ciara passed her Bachelor's exams at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (major: bass guitar) with first class honours. She is currently involved in various band and studio projects and offers online and in-person lessons in the bass, ear training, composition, music theory and more. Beside taking part in many competitions and winning awards, Ciara has been a guest in various TV shows, radio shows, and podcasts. Ciara has taken part at the 5 Week Aspire "Women’s Performance Program" at Berklee College of Music, Boston MA. As of September 2019, she took up studies at Berklee College of Music. She studied for one semester in the undergraduate program and is currently doing her masters at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. Since March 2019 Ciara has had her own podcast called "Blind. So What?" in which she talks about daily life as a blind person.
ciara-moser.com

TONICA HUNTER

is a researcher, curator & cultural producer based in Vienna, Austria.