Merche Blasco - Anette
Biliana Voutchkova - violin, voice
Biliana Voutchkova and Merche Blasco present their unique blend of instruments, featuring Voutchkova’s voice and idiosyncratic exploration of the violin and Blasco performing Anette, a 3D printer that she built as her interlocutor and companion in the performance space. Both artists draw attention to symbiotic hand gestures and colorful aural soundscapes performed through either an octophonic or quadraphonic system, emphasizing the interconnectedness between humans and machines. Voutchkova developed a distinctive and expressive language on a historical instrument - the violin, combining it with her voice. Meanwhile, Blasco wears on her fingers thimble-microphones printed by Anette, which render the machine's unique electromagnetic voice audible to human ears. The two composer-performers are also developing a new audiovisual setting where small cameras are worn on their hands, to capture intricate details of their movements.
Merche Blasco (US/DE)
Merche Blasco (US/DE) is a multimedia artist and composer based in New York, and currently living in Berlin. She designs and builds imprecise technological assemblages that catalyze embodied forms of live electroacoustic composition and new modes of listening. Her work also increasingly focuses on designing participatory sound performances in public spaces to connect strangers and their surroundings through collective music-making and listening.
Blasco has presented her performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Shed, CTM Festival, MaerzMusik, Sonar Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, NIME conferences, Tsonami International Sound Art Festival in Chile, The High Line in New York, SONIC Festival, Mapping Festival (Geneva), Queens Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile, among others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, El Pais Semanal, and The Wire magazine.
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Biliana Voutchkova (BG/DE)
Biliana Voutchkova (BG/DE) is a dynamic, thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, violinist, composer-performer, improvisor and curator with a highly distinctive artistic language. Through the prism of listening, her early training in classical music and the years of development as contemporary artist-performer, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities (including concerts, original site specific formats, exhibitions, long durational, multidisciplinary, audiovisual and installation works with focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space).
Voutchkova is the founder of DARA String Festival, faculty at HKB Bern, 2022/23 SHAPE+ Platform artist, a recent recipient of stipends for the Berlin residency at Cité des Arts/Paris and Villa Aurora/Los Angeles. She is released on Relative Pitch Records, Unsounds, Another Timbre and Confront recordings, and most recently heard at the festivals, Skanu Mežs, Maerz Musik and Meakusma.
bilianavoutchkova.net
