In August 2025, I collaborated with Awa Jalali, a dancer and performer, on a project titled UN03, presented at dbstudio in Berlin.
Awa approached me to create the soundscape for her performance — a work reflecting on the feeling of being unseen or neglected while being fully present.

The performance was part of her broader artistic research, touching on recent events and their emotional residue, while exploring how visibility, silence, and movement interact within shared space.

Process

I started the soundscape with an 8-minute sound collage built from free samples of fighter jets and F-35 recordings — not as literal war sounds, but as a texture of tension, distance, and suspended weight.
The sound was meant to occupy the space like an invisible architecture — something you feel more than you can describe.

Following that came Awa’s 15-minute narration, which she recorded and sent to me.
My task was to explore temporal shifts within her voice — stretching, warping, and layering time in sound — while keeping her story partially intelligible.
The goal was to allow meaning to flicker through abstraction, without losing the emotional thread of her words.

The main challenge was balancing comprehensibility and atmosphere.
I wanted the narrative to remain present, even when the language itself began to dissolve into tone and breath.

Reflections

The final composition lasted around 20 minutes, forming an evolving sound field where narration and noise blurred into each other.
It was not simply accompaniment — it was a shared act of listening, an invitation to experience presence together.

Through UN03, I began to see listening as a collective provocation — a way to open spaces for speaking about traumatic experiences, even when words alone can’t reach them.
In that sense, the performance was less about sound or movement and more about making silence audible — together.