Messy Sensing Presents: Voicing Places
Voicing Places
Voicing Places is a platform for artistic research amplifying embodied, community-based reflections on listening and aural practices. We operate in the space where critical sound studies, sonic journalism, soundmaking, and soundwalking echo and resonate with each other.
Our starting point is the fundamental instability of practice. Sensing is inherently messy; being in a body and relating to a site is an unstable process. We believe our sonic practices must address this directly, embracing the muddy, shifting ground on which we stand. We propose investigating sites in ways that intentionally straddle the discursive and the sensory from start to end. This involves enacting sound art practices while inhabiting our bodies as we walk, voice and listen, exploring the production of sites and subjects.
Our approach is phenomenological, akin to sensory ethnography, attuned to how the political affects of today leak into our ways of being. We connect to the different, often conflicting, aspects of a place – its historical layers, social dynamics, political contours, and the tensions between the imaginary and the real.
Messy Sensing – an artistic duo between Anna Jurkiewicz and Reza Kellner. It emerged in 2023 from fascination with multilayer sensory imaginaries connected to specific places. It works with photography and sound (through the body called Reza Kellner), voice, video, and writing (through the body called Anna Jurkiewicz). It wants to honour all kinds of bodies, surrounded
and absorbed by messy feasting and messy growing. Perpetual sensory exchanges and negotiations between crowds of not closely related – in the genetic sense of the word – but not
unrelated bodies, affected by each other.
ACTS
Lecture-Performance #1
"becoming more than one "
In the lecture performance ‘becoming more than one’, Adina Camhy deals with voices of the victims of the 1493 witch trial in St. Leonhard, considered the first witch trial on today’s Austrian territory which led to executions. How can we deal with documentation of past patriarchal and gender-based violence today – in archives, at sites, in the landscape? How to work with archival traces when victims’ voices survive only through their tormentors’ records? Adina Camhy recently realised a temporary monument in Bad St. Leonhard / Carinthia, remembering the victims of the witch-hunts in the Lavant Valley. Initiated by the cultural Initiative Container25, the monument was inaugurated in autumn 2025.
Adina Camhy is interested in the pressing questions of our time, in technology, history and memory, in peripheries and glimpses beneath surfaces. Camhy researches, deconstructs and remixes. Her research-based work ranges from video, sound, print to performance and is shown in public spaces, swimming pools and coffee houses as well as at film festivals, cinemas and exhibitions. In her music she interweaves electronics, field recordings, voice and effects, creating subtle, alienated and eery fragmented soundtrack-like soundscapes between noise, ambient, drone and industrial. Camhy studied architecture at TU Graz and UPV Valencia (ES) and Master Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (ongoing). She has received scholarships, grants and awards, including the City of Graz Working Scholarship for Fine Arts (2025), the Carinthia Annual Scholarship for Interdisciplinary Art Forms (2023), the Pixel, Bytes + Film Grant (2022), among others.
Lecture-Performance #2
In her second lecture performance for Voicing Places, Anna Jurkiewicz outlines a situated phenomenology of ever-morphing matter which never fails to bring the atmospheric and the planetary into late capitalism. The work investigates how snow transforms the land, affordances and sensory abilities while embodying a specific temporality and conflicting potentialities of voicing and muting, concealing and uncovering, leveling and othering. The performance brings together video art, artistic research, vocal performance and sound art in a playful and meditative sequence.
Anna Jurkiewicz is a transdisciplinary artist working with sound, video, writing and voice. She engages in artistic research around more-than-human timelines, architectures and interactions. Some of her projects explore karst landscapes created by water through deep-time processes of dissolution and sedimentation. Most focus on multispecies relations that produce space and habitats. Her artistic practice often comes with the intention of strengthening interspecies empathy. As a sound artist, Jurkiewicz works with field recording, various microphones, voice and found footage to create multi-layered sound collages. As a vocalist, she recycles archives, composes music and explores resonance in various spaces, including an acoustic inventory of caves. In her work, a background in traditional music, ethnography and linguistics is combined with research and a personal practice of listening and cultivating intimate relationships with environments.
Lecture-Performance #3
Reza Kellner’s research explores processes of perforation and breakage, the rupturing of membranes, the fracturing of solid and the dissolution of forms. His lecture-performance for Voicing Places deliberately avoids the language of rationalization and channels witnessed and experienced emotions. These reflections arise from the chaos and unpredictability of world events, with particular attention to events unfolding in West Asia.
Music Act #1
fabien artal is a French-born sound artist and electronic music performer currently studying at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz (Austria). Since graduating from ESAAIX in 2008, he has performed in several international festivals and events from different musical horizons and has been involved as a composer, sound designer, and developer in various projects. Throughout the years, he has been exploring the space of perception and more specifically the thin layer between the inner and the outer perceptive milieux.
fabien artal’s Impulse Train is a performative wave installation that explores the physicality of sound once projected into space and perceptive distortions. In this piece, the space is stimulated by a continuous train of wave fronts projected at fixed time intervals. The latter intervals, as well as the frequencies of the sine waves sent on each channel, are calculated according to the dimensions of the room. Each channel is then processed to reveal the experience Impulse Train is trying to carry. The very substance of this piece realizes itself in its projection space, where it meets the sensing bodies. In this temporary sonotopy made of frictions, acoustic patterns and movements, Impulse Train, by inducing an embodied experience of our immediate surrounding, invites us to dissolve and question the role of our body in the act of sensing.
Music Act #2
o-m-ae: Live
o-m-ae is a collaboration between two musicians and sound artists, Zlata Zhdkv and ANTUUM. The duo practices sonic storytelling, often creating dark, enchanted forests with barren trees, cold winds, witches, and pilgrims. These stories avoid comfort and leave nothing softened; they neither conceal chaos nor moral rupture, yet leave space for hope.
o-m-ae mixes cello and flute with digital processing and field recordings, shaping slow, shadowed soundscapes.
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18.00 Lecture-Performance #1: Adina Camhy
18.45 Lecture-Performance #2: Anna Jurkiewicz
19.15 Music Act #1: fabien artal
19.30 break
19.45 Lecture-Performance #3: Reza Kellner
20.00 Talk
20.30 Music Act #2: o-m-ae Live
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Voicing Places is curated by Messy Sensing and kindly supported by BMWKMS, Land Steiermark and Stadt Graz.
