Anna-Kaisa Meklin

Anna-Kaisa Meklin, *1979 in Finland, lives and works in Basel (Switzerland)
Residency period : July to September 2019
Musician and multi-instrumentalist

Granted by the Republic and Canton of Geneva

As a musician she has an interdisciplinary approach, she likes to combine different musical styles as well as include other mediums like texts, videos etc. as performative elements in her work. Her projects often locate in interspaces between different musical languages, like early music and experimental, free improvised music. She is part of the big improvising and experimental ensembles InsubMetaOrchestra and UnorthodoxJukeboxLargeEnsemble, and plays actively in many other improvising ensembles in the free music scene. She has studied early music and free improvisation at the Music Academy of Basel as well as gender studies and religious studies at the University of Basel.

Statement

« I think that conceptual creativity in ways of being human – including musicmaking – is fruitful and necessary today. Part of my conceptual work as a musician is to find insights about collective, non-hieararchical way of making music. I would like to find these insights using my experiences I have made collectively as a musician. For my residence here in Geneva I am thinking specially about the Geneva based InsubMetaOrchestra. My work includes the questioning of the importance of a creating subject of a work (and the classification activity/passivity) My idea is to create a sound field where interaction between different elements, like myself, sounds in the environment, texts etc. can take place. The human voice has a central position in my work, understood as a wide concept, that will be reflected in different levels in my work. There is the historical level with the focus on my instrument viola da gamba, that has been historically seen as a reference to a human voice. There is the posthuman level where my research goes towards extended human voices. How does a human voice sound today, in it’s context for beautyness and ugliness, in it’s context of digitalisation? I am interested in searching for a line to distinguish between human/human made or acoustic/electronic sound. How depersonalized must the sound be to not to be taken as a human anymore? Then there is the level to look at the performance as a whole, with it’s environnemental surroundings. What is the role of a listener, the act of listening? The use of field recordings has a connecting and observing function for my work. The idea is to create an archive of sounds reflecting the human voice from a specific point of view in the local context. But at the same time field recordings are portable, easy to take with and therefore they serve my idea of a flexible, nomadic performance, easy to adapt for other contexts. My practical approach for the residency in Geneva will include improvising, field recordings, textwork and technical work in order to build up a basic set up for creating multidimensional performance(s). »

Website: www.annakaisameklin.com