Judith Hamann

Begun as a collection of embryonic explorations collating recent writing, performing, and thinking about geese, Judith will continue their ongoing research project ‘Goose Apparitions.’ 

Geese generally are connected to thinking about or conceiving a relationship to time, age and timelessness: from the Grey Goose Laws of Iceland to Siberian mythology. They are also connected to map making, to measurement and lines, and also to entanglement via our understanding and use of concepts around skeins, threads, and labyrinths. Geese and their migratory patterns are highly reactive to climate change, with routes and roosting sites rapidly changing each year, bringing them into increasing conflict with human actors. Specifically, barnacle geese blur and challenge given systems of positivist, mechanical approaches to science. Looping together Darwin’s Cirripedes research, miracle, and magic into the same space, this particular goose has been understood within a kind of shimmer of origins, in turn: a parthenogenic creature, a plant, an arthropod, pure miracle, as a life emerging from non-life.

At the Saari Residence I propose to continue to expand this research with the ultimate aim of completing a long form text paired with sound recordings, bringing these strands together into connected interdisciplinary work. 

I will also begin development of audio fixed media works for field recordings, cello, and electronics which will form part of an ongoing creative research project regarding the concept of collapse. This work uses palimpsests, collisions, fictions, and cumulative processes to generate site specific sonic renderings of impossible surfaces and imaginary spaces. 

Judith Hamann is a composer/performer born in Narrm/Melbourne, and currently based in Berlin. Described as an “extraordinary Australian cellist” (the Guardian), 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” (WIRE), their work encompasses performance, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice.

In recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy.

Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, and Shelter Press. Judith holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego.