a.k.a: mellimbrosia ︎
Uliana Bychenkova
Uliana Bychenkova is an interdisciplinary artist & designer, composer & performer, curator & researcher. In Sonic Arts, Uliana is interested in exploring a variety of acoustic and electronic sound objects overcoming their hierarchies but is particularly fascinated by the voice as a tool in self-discovery as a composer and performer. She focuses on the timbre-oriented aesthetics of New Music; drawing inspiration from the Feminist Musicology and Intermedia Studies; paying particular attention in her practice the relationships of Electroacoustic Composition with different dimensions of the Visual Composition field, among which are the Sound Design & Film Scoring. With a background in noise performance, Uliana studied at the school of Ukrainian composer Katarina Gryvul, where timbre and form were paid the most strong attention. Focusing on the intermedial dimensions of electroacoustics and employing feminist optics, in 2024 she graduated from SeaM (Studio for Electroacoustic Music in Bauhaus University Weimar, M.F.A.), with an electroacoustic score for the short film-performance “Scales” directed by Anna Scherbyna (e-flux Film Award 2024).
Study for incredibly smart dark kittens
4' 08", fixed media, stereo, 2023At this point, I would like to send some greetings to Enola Holmes, Mica Levi, and the indestructible power of horror*, which milk foam ideally possesses!
The piece was made to explore the invisible agency of the acoustic potential of everyday objects, imperceptible little things like a needle, a thread, and a porcelain cup. The acousmatic texture of otherwise innocuous objects turns out to be both horror and pleasure.
———
*In her Essay “Approaching Abjection” (“Powers of Horror”, 1982), Julia Kristeva describes a curious form of dialogic relationship between object and subject: the mere sight of a harmless material substance (milk froth) provokes a whole series of complex physiological and psychological reactions. Deprived of special symbolic meaning, the foam sets a person in motion solely due to the specifics of its texture:
“When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; <...> “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. <...> That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling.”
The Remembrance of Air
4' 50", fixed media, stereo, 2022
The study was assembled from the sounds of my everyday Weimar life: the space of a building where I live and an area on my way to the grocery store. While working on the collected material, I wanted to indicate the difference between air and underwater environments, and to express such transition processes as diving and surfacing, through different approaches to stereo gestures and speed. Of course, these symbols refer only to the imaginary spaces of human perception, not real physics. The title of the study refers to the work of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray “The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger”, which criticizes the tradition of Western metaphysics. Sound as well as Air is an important object of New Materialism, an intellectual space of inclusive sensitivity to the weightless and invisible tissues.
Outline Ritornello
“Velyki Selmentsi”
13' 38", Sound Essay, fixed media, stereo, 2023I had a peculiar listening situation on my way from Ukraine to Germany at the end of February 2022. It took place somewhere on the Carpathian mountain’s serpentine road when we tried to get to the border on a minibus of Polish activists. It was already night when we got closer to the borderline but then our driver realised that we got lost. We tried to search for other border points and the driver was in touch with his Polish colleague by phone. I was sitting near and listening to this sound situation in the middle of the night on a serpentine snow road: the driver tried to spell in the right way the name of the next border point using Polish names to transcribe the Ukrainian toponym “Velyki Selmentsi”.
There is something performative in the process of producing a sound essay — a memory lived through bodily effort and bodily inventiveness to express a thought. Observing my own inability to grasp the form of piece, I suddenly came to the conclusion that the elusive contour is its compositional character. However, the very act of groping, of feeling one's perceptual memory, of returning, which refines the contour as much as it loses it, is in itself a rotation, a ritornello of drilling at certain distant point. Dealing with memory, trying to comprehend its aesthetic formula, remembering details that can’t help to build a smooth monolithic monument. Each subsequent memory is a variation of the strokes, hazy, inaccurate and blurred in space. The serpentine shape, which I mysteriously was aspired to, seemed to me the embodiment of lightness — I was imagining a halo of smoke rising up in a spiral, where names like stars under a dome become exact coordinates. But nothing is certain in smoke. Navigation in the space is dramatically unstructured, and some random abstract data can become a coordinate cipher.
iS
Uliana Bychenkova & Leonard Frieselive performance, 8' 00", 2024
Verbal and non-verbal communication between two voices and two instruments, breathing and non-breathing matter.
“I say that that which is is.
I say that that which is not also is.”
(Monique Wittig, “Les Guérillères”)
Performers:
Violin: Haonan Guo;
Soprano: Uliana Bychenkova;
Contralto: Mariam Kunchuliya;
Accordion: Leonard Friese.
︎ read ︎
Who Sales Between The Scales?
(Mermaid Lullabies Manifesto)
Feminist Artistiс Research, 2024