Siegmar Zacharias & Judith Hamann – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin

Siegmar Zacharias (RO/D) works with different formats - performances, lectures and installations - that deal with the juxtaposition and opposition of theory and material. These oscillate aesthetically between labor and humor, do-it-yourself low- and high-tech. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in theaters and festivals, in galleries and conferences, in greenhouses, in the forest and in the sky. The subject of her art are questions of co-authorship, the role of the audience, and the formation of affective knowledge and experience. Zacharias is a member of the collective SXS Enterprise and co-founder of the artistic exchange and research platform WOW - WE WORK HERE. In addition to her art, she is also a lecturer - among others at DasArts (NL), DOCH (SWE), HZT Berlin and Folkwang University Essen. Her work develops formats of performances, immersive installations, discursive encounters that address questions of generative ethical dynamics of transformation: ecologies of artistic and social practice, agency, trauma work, death-positivity. She works with people and uncontrollable material such as smoke, mucus and the nervous system. For example, SLIME DYNAMICS (Sophiensæle Berlin, FFT Düsseldorf), Drooling Lecture (Tanznacht & MontagsModus Berlin, Centro Centro Madrid, Forum Amsterdam, FFT Düsseldorf) were created. With the idea of doing artistic research in public, she developed 24-hour immersive curatorial projects under the title Training for political imagination since 2017, where researchers*, artists*, activists* were invited to share their work with the audience. Events emerged such as: The Other Thing (MDT Stockholm 2017), Intimacy with Death (Agora Berlin 2018), Posthuman Solidarities (FFT Düsseldorf 2019), ANIMAterialities - The Future of Grief (FFT Düsseldorf 2020).

Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. They have “long been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts) and as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (Louise Grey, WIRE Magazine). Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, field recording, electronics, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a deeply considered process based creative practice. In the past, they mostly focused on performing as a process/practice, which took place in many contexts and locations. This included things like Tectonics, Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Maerzmusik (Berlin), The Los Angeles Philharmonic Fluxus Festival (LA), Tokyo Experimental Festival (Tokyo), AURAL (Mexico City), SiDance Festival (Seoul), No Idea Festival (Austin), and Dark Mofo (Hobart). Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, Longform Editions, Marginal Frequency and the Sonic Arts Research Unit's Audiograft festival. Judith holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of California, San Diego.