Lecture-plus-video held at the University of Graz as part of the series “Perceiving Nature(s): Epistemic, Artistic, and Political Practices as Contested Fields” @Core Research Area of the Faculty of Humanities | Perception, May 2025.
Exploring a new sensibility and more-than-human practice in composition: A posthuman approach towards music and performance.
The paradigms of posthumanist philosophy, new materialisms and multispecies conceptions invite us, as artists and/or researchers, to relocate our position – both within our core disciplines and practices, and in relation to the rest of the world. Significant changes are taking place: a surge in technologies that redefine the human condition, structural injustices, social unrest and wars, environmental changes and the devastation of species. These multiple factors displace the centrality of humans, they dislocate definitions of what it may mean to be human, and they alter human cultures – we witness the posthuman convergence. As human beings and as artists, we do not merely respond to the world’s condition, we are actively part of it, as are the complex activities of composing music and theatre. Finding ourselves enmeshed within systems of interdependent living and non-living agencies on this planet, we, as artists and/or researchers, propose with Karen Barad that our activities are “part of the world’s becoming”.
From here, new questions arise in our practice: Can we, as artists and/or researchers, become sensitised to a multi-species process? Can music be co-created in such an interactive process? How can we facilitate multispecies thinking, acting, and co-creating? Along these questions, composer Pia Palme will invite the audience to a discourse around her current research and explorations for a music theatre project that involves the river Danube as a collaborator.
Video still @Pia Palme 2025
