TURNS ECO/EXO: SCREAMING VIBRATION

Lila-Zoé Krauß x Rojin Sharafi

Thu, April 30, 2026 7:00 pm CEST

© Hessam Samavatian © Jaana van Brussel
Location
Cube
Entrance fee
Tickets from 7 € | Free admission for anyone younger than 27

Tickets available at the ZKM | Information Desk, the box office, and on reservix (plus fee)

SCREAMING VIBRATION presents two outstanding, internationally‑renowned voices of experimental music in the Klangdom: Lila-Zoé Krauß (L Twills) and Rojin Sharafi. Krauß draws on the manic scenes of opera, re‑weaving them into fresh narratives that explore mental health amid ecological fragility. Rojin Sharafi fuses experimental composition with noise, creating visceral soundscapes that oscillate between the organic and the mechanistic. Together they transform the space into a pulsating environment that balances inner tension with cosmic expansiveness.

The new ECO/EXO cycle translates central areas of tension in the present into immersive sound spaces and combines ecological fragility with speculative, extraterrestrial perspectives. Both artistic positions use space as an active compositional element working with multi-layered electroacoustic processes. The concert contrasts two different approaches to material, perception, and time. Together, the works open up new perspectives of listening between body, environment, and imagination.

  1. The Art of Mind

    Lila-Zoé Krauß (L Twills)

    [The Art of Mind] is a new multimedia opera. With this project, I investigate postmodern subjectivity and agency through the history of madness in the European context. Combining music, video, performance, and computational media, the work examines how regimes of rationality, productivity, and normativity are shaped through modern psychiatry, media, and democratic capitalism.

    In the Kubus at ZKM, I will present the heart of the opera—an excerpt of its spatial composition. In the face of a seemingly disintegrating world, the musical form of the mad scene provides the structural lens for the five musical parts of the piece: a prologue and four acts.

    Since the auto-fictional character Girl traveled through her mind using the computer program The Art of Mind, she senses something that feels irretrievably lost. She has no words for it yet. Instead, it manifests as unfamiliar voices that both call and haunt her. While her mother MOW (Manic Old Woman) decides to remain in a psychiatric ward rather than follow a master plan prescribed by the unemployment office, Girl sets out to search for the origin of the computer program, hoping to decipher the strange calls.

    Characterized by abrupt shifts, fragmented text, and expressively unbounded vocals, the mad scene dramatizes a character’s psychological unravelling. Within [The Art of Mind], this form becomes a vehicle for reimagining our relationship to madness and for articulating the emotional landscape of a world in crisis.

  2. Sinthome

    Rojin Sharafi

    Sinthome is the solo version of Sinthome’s Scenery, a performance by Rojin Sharafi that unfolds as a sonic state of entanglement. Drawing on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s notion of the sinthome as a singular knot that holds existence together, and resonating with the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva’s thinking on relationality and entanglement, the work explores a temporality in which past, present, and future remain interwoven.

    Through microtonal structures, polymetric tensions, analog synthesizers, voice, live processing, and electronically transformed sound, the piece moves between harshness and fragility, density and exposure. Folkloric traces and abstract noise textures coexist without hierarchy, while acoustic and electronic materials continuously shift into one another. Rather than following a linear narrative, Sinthome unfolds through cuts, transitions, and unstable continuities.

    Sound becomes a way of holding together heterogeneous times and affects — a knot through which fracture, memory, and persistence can be heard at once.

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