Ella Ziegler's artistic and curatorial projects constitute an ongoing choreographic, communicative, sculptural, and performative practice that examines spatial, social, and political situations and constellations, introducing narrative episodes of her own—in the form of performances and interventions—into the respective contexts. Her interdisciplinary and participatory project formats reveal atmospheric and associative frames of reference that expose everyday systems and lay bare their underlying logic.

Tsepo Kolitsoe Pooe is a Johannesburg-born cellist and conductor based in Berlin. His work spans classical performance, sound art, and electronic experimentation, exploring themes of migration, displacement, and sonic experimentation. 

A Bow. Rehaired with tail hair from Harmony and Quintera, the bow carries within it a compressed ecology. Animal, wood, resin and human craft are brought together through tension and friction. Each material has been removed from its original context, shaped and transformed in order to make sound possible. The bow therefore holds a delicate balance between care and extraction, dependence and intervention. Through improvisation, field recordings and live electronics, Tsepo approaches the bow as a medium of return. Its sound is carried back into the natural world from which its materials originate, where it encounters the acoustic life of the Krämerwald. This is not an attempt to restore something untouched, but to acknowledge the relationships contained within the object and the processes that have made it possible.

In Tswana tradition, Go Phahla is an act of addressing and acknowledging the ancestors. Drawing on this gesture without attempting to reproduce the ritual itself, the bow becomes a means of address, carrying the transformed presence of animal, tree and human craft back into the forest. 

The performance becomes a sonic act of mediation between the bow and the forest. Field recordings and electronics open a space in which the sound of the instrument and the sound of the landscape can meet, overlap and respond to one another. In this exchange, the bow is not only understood as a musical tool, but as a vessel of material histories, dependencies and return.

@ez.ellaziegler
www.ella-ziegler.de
@tsepo.pooe
www.tsepo-pooe.com