focus: default#19 - 14.12.2024 with Zara Joan Miller, Mette Edvardsen, Tom Mudd, Augustė Vickunaitė
In this focus newsletter, we would like to share with you more information on our upcoming program
default#19, Saturday, 14th of December, The Grey Space in The Middle, Paviljoensgracht 20-24, 2512 BP Den Haag
Zara Joan Miller, Mette Edvardsen, Tom Mudd, Augustė Vickunaitė
We are happy to invite you to the last edition of default den haag this year – default#19 will be taking place in The Grey Space in The Middle on the 14th of December. In this program we are focusing on artists from various disciplinary backgrounds, engaging in different sound poetics, featuring performances by Zara Joan Miller, Mette Edvardsen, Tom Mudd, and Augustė Vickunaitė – read more information on the performances below.
doors open at 19:30, performances start at 20:00
Tickets | €12.5 (student) / €15 (general)* We recommend reserving your tickets in advance.
*in case your current financial situation does not allow you to visit the event, but you are keen on coming, you can mail to info@defaultdenhaag.com and we can find a solution.
Zara Joan Miller
Zara Joan Miller is an artist working across film, poetry, and performance. Often playing with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm, her work seeks to unravel boundaries between human and non-human nature. In her performances, she presents carefully crafted pieces, often with words (reading) and an accompanying visual element. During default#19, Zara will be interweaving the rhythm of her kodak slide projector with her writing.
Zara is the author of the poetry collection ‘BLUE MONDAY’ (JOAN Publishing, 2022), which was also released as a duo record with cellist Ute Kanngießer (Reading Group, 2023). Populated by strangers and lovers, the living and the dead, the poems move across domestic and imagined landscapes as a way of observing the mundane and moving through a year at a sensitively tempered speed.
Her work has recently been presented at Barbican Centre, Muse Gallery, Cafe OTO, Horse Hospital, No.9 Cork St. (London),In Vitro (Brussels), and Lausanne Underground Film Festival. Materialising in a variety of formats, Zara’s collaborations have involved such artists as Áine O'Dwyer, Astrid Sweeney, Billy Steiger, and @xcrswx (Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright).
Mette Edvardsen
The work of Mette Edvardsen is situated within the performing arts field as a choreographer and performer, eager to explore other media or formats, such as video, books, writing, and sound, with her interest always being in their relationship to the performing arts as a practice and a situation.
During default#19, Mette Edvardsen will be revisiting her collaborative work with her daughter Iben Edvardsen ‘Livre d’images sans images’ (2023). The initial work borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as ‘The Moon Chronicler’. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl (released via Xing), paper, and live performance.
For her upcoming performance at default#19, Edvardsen will select materials from ‘Livre d’images sans images’, describing scenes, playing tracks of voices from the past, summoning images of moons to come.
Mette Edvardsen has worked since 1994 as a dancer and performer for a number of companies and projects, and has been developing her own work since 2002. She presents her works internationally and continues to develop projects with other artists, both as a collaborator and as a performer. She has produced such performances as ‘Black’ (2011), ‘No Title’ (2014), ‘We to Be’ (2015), ‘oslo’ (2017) which form a series on the limits of language, ‘Penelope sleeps’ (2019), an opera in essay form with music by Matteo Fargion, and her long-term project ‘Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine’, that develops learning by heart as a practice, inviting performers to memorise a book of their choice, forming a library collection of living books. The ongoing project has been presented in 40 cities all over the world.
Retrospectives of her work have been presented at Black Box theatre in Oslo, the focus program ‘Idiorritmias’ at MACBA in Barcelona, and presented a performative exhibition ‘Suppose a Room’ in Amant, New York. In 2022/2023 she developed a project in residence on the gesture of writing, how to organise the library, orality, and translation at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris, before premiering the work ‘Livre d'images sans images’ in 2023.
Mette Edvarden furthermore runs Norma T (a project room, an occasional bookshop in Oslo), and alongside her live works has developed a publishing practice, both within her own artistic work as well as co-running Varamo Press since 2018: an artist-run, independent publishing house, publishing among others experimental essays on movement and dance, giving a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere.
Tom Mudd
Tom Mudd makes music with computers. He is a musician and programmer interested in relationships between software and music making.
These preoccupations throughout the past years have manifested in a deeply engaged perceptual and compositional exploration of the technique of physical modelling: digital sound synthesis processes based on physical simulations of acoustic objects and instruments, often emulating brass and guitar-like instruments. The models require the musician to specify the nature of the instrument and the nature of the performance in terms of physical parameters such as – string tension, valve size, finger forces, breath pressure and lip mass.
After working with resonance, excitation, and oscillation within a constrained feedback network on ‘Gutter Synthesis’ (Entr’acte, 2018), and the modelling of brass objects on ‘Brass Cultures’ (Fancyyyyy, 2019), he most recently released ‘Guitar Cultures’ (via Fancyyyyy, 2023), from which he will bring related materials from for his performance at default#19.
In ‘Guitar Cultures’, opposed to solely pushing each parameter of the artificial guitar to its materially impossible extremes, which can be tempting when working with tools that enable to trick and ridicule the physical process of music-making and tradition, Tom instead is ultimately more concerned with the unavoidable rootedness of sound, the place of the instrument as tool in a complex network of social and historical relations. These questions regarding rootedness and tradition, computer music and avant-garde instrumentalism reflect back clearly enough in the song titles of the release – e.g. ‘Algorithm for Derek Bailey’, ‘12-string Lament’.
Tom’s music explores the digital incarnations of the instruments in a playful way, probing at what the instruments ‘know’ about music, what cultural resonances are hard-wired into our hearing of such instruments, and what happens when the physical musician is replaced with an algorithmic process.
Augustė Vickunaitė
Augustė Vickunaitė is a sound experimentalist with a background in physics. Augustė exclusively employs vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders to play, record, and create sounds, articulating diverse layers of recordings including found material, field recordings, voice, music instruments, objects, and the whole spectrum of malfunctions of decaying technology. She specializes in tape music, noise, and collage music, known for her theatrical and darkly humorous approach, often exploiting errors of analog audio equipment. Her solo work encompasses tape loops and collages of found audio tapes.
Performing and improvising with her reel-to-reel set up solo since 2016, she has been actively touring during the past year, while self-releasing her album ‘Dance Alone’ back in March. The album brings forward her raw, reduced, yet groovy signature sound, inhabiting its own space in a broad lineage of hand-crafted physical tape-loop music. Augustė is furthermore an affiliate of the venturesome diy community surrounding the Vilnius’ Studium P venue.
default#19 is financially supported by The Municipality of The Hague and the Konrad Boehmer Foundation.
About Us
default den haag is a non-profit curatorial initiative focused on the presentation of creative contemporary sound and performance in the Hague, curating and organizing their nomadic sound series with an international focus on experimental music and sound art performances since 2022, next to occasionally hosting accompanying talks and lectures. - read more