swim 2026
swim (spatial works and immersive music) is an invitation to cast musical conventions aside. In this series, ZiMMT presents international and local artists who artistically explore sound in space in a wide variety of ways.
The concerts and sound installations bridge the gap between the vastly different sonic worlds of electronic genres. Radical approaches to music production and performance clash with established habits. A broad spectrum of musical forms of expression is integrated into immersive, spatially expansive experiences—from multi-layered electroacoustic compositions to experimental approaches rooted in the aesthetics of club music. New instruments take the stage, and familiar instruments are used in unfamiliar contexts. The role of the audience is also changing as they collectively immerse themselves in three-dimensional sound environments.
During three-day micro-residencies, musicians can develop their work on-site using 3D audio technology and experiment with new approaches. All concerts will be live-streamed in high quality with spatial, binaural audio.
25. April: AGF · Eve Aboulkheir
3D Audio Concert · 7 pm (Doors open) / 8 pm (Start) · Admission: €15 (reg) / €10 (red) / €18 (soli)
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Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF)
Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF) is an audio sculptress, sound artist & facilitator, poemproducer & intersectional feminist networker. Born in 1969, and raised in East Germany, she has lived and worked in Hailuoto, Finland since 2008. She works with language, sound, listening, voice, and politics and has release more than 30 records. Since 2020 she curates rec-on.org where she creates space for political sound & listening. Greie-Ripatti is also actively involved in feminist networks such as female:pressure and eastblocsound, developing projects that increase the visibility of women and non-binary artists in electronic music and sound art. Her artistic practice combines aesthetic innovation with socio-political perspectives, often addressing issues of identity, power structures and collective memory.
‘Haltung’ (Kannanotto)
AGF will perform a version of ‘Haltung’ (Kannanotto), meaning stance, position, principle core strength and perseverance. How to hold one’s space under attack, under compromise; how to create a democratic space; and what it means to participate. Using spatial audio as a form of sonic parliament – a social sounding space where our bodies resonate in dissonance through voicing, listening and feedback – a lucid space of possibility unfolds. The composition reflects on how we can weave communities under collective dissonance on a planet under attack and exploitation, combining spacialised sonic weaving and vocalisation into texture-rich field recordings and stacked, textural, interspecific sonifications of mycelial tapestries. Derived from collaborative practices such as #sonicwilderness and #soundasgrowing, AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti), a East German-socialised poet and media artist now based in Hailuoto, utilises language and music to explore the quantum within the depths of sound.
Eve Aboulkheir
Eve Aboulkheir is a French sound artist and composer, a graduate of the Villa Arson, the National School of Art in Nice. She uses field recordings gathered in specific sites, blending them with synthetic textures. Her work often begins from lived experiences of perceptual disturbance—moments when sensory input falters and the world seems to slip. Her compositions emerge from that instability, inviting listeners into in-between zones where meaning destabilizes. Her music has been released in the GRM Portraits series (INA GRM – Shelter Press) and on the Kraak label. She has performed in venues and festivals such as INA GRM/Maison de la Radio, Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), CTM Festival (Berlin), Lampo (Chicago), and Café Oto (London).
Medea(s) – Tskaltubo is a sound work by Eve Aboulkheir based on a speculative exploration of the Medea sanatorium, located in the former Soviet spa town of Tskaltubo, Georgia. The piece draws on recordings made inside the abandoned building, transformed through a modular synthesizer, as well as sounds produced with the ARP 2500 during a residency at INA GRM in Paris. Tskaltubo once welcomed numerous Soviet visitors seeking thermal treatments, before the sanatoriums were abandoned after the collapse of the USSR and later partially occupied by people displaced by the war in Abkhazia. The Medea sanatorium thus appears as a space suspended between past grandeur and ruin. Aboulkheir’s artistic approach is grounded in a sensitive listening to the site, conceived as a succession of listening points where resonances, natural sounds, and architectural elements intertwine. She regards Medea as an ambiguous space, gradually reclaimed by nature, whose very name evokes a tension between healing and poison.
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30. May: Thomas Ankersmit · Robert Lippok & Anushka Chkheidze
3D Audio Concert · 7 pm (Doors open) / 8 pm (Start) · Admission: €15 (reg) / €10 (red) / €18 (soli)
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Thomas Ankersmit
Thomas Ankersmit is a musician, composer and sound artist from Leiden, Netherlands, who lives in Berlin and Amsterdam. For almost two decades, he has devoted his work to the Serge Modular Synthesizer, one of the most versatile and experimental instruments in analogue sound generation. His artistic approach moves at the intersection of musique concrète, electroacoustic improvisation and psychoacoustic sound art. An essential aspect of Ankersmit’s practice is the exploration of the physical and spatial dimensions of sound. Acoustic phenomena such as infrasound, otoacoustic emissions and directional sound projections play a central role in this. By consciously transcending technical boundaries – such as the creative use of feedback, signal interference and extreme frequency ranges – he creates works of high precision and physical intensity.
The Tcherepnin Series – Music for the Original Serge Synthesizers
For two decades, composer and sound artist Thomas Ankersmit (PAN, Touch, Shelter Press) has dedicated his practice to the Serge Modular analog synthesizer, channeling inspirations from musique concrète, electroacoustic improvisation, and psychoacoustic sound art through a single instrument. With his new project, Ankersmit returns to the instrument’s origins: composing for the large, original Serge systems—the “motherships”—that survive in historic studios worldwide. Throughout 2025 he has been given rare access to record at Harvard University, Columbia University, CalArts (Los Angeles), EMS (Stockholm), GRM (Paris), and Willem Twee Studios (Den Bosch), with further residencies scheduled from Helsinki to Melbourne. After a sold-out premiere at Triennale Milano in early 2026, the project will tour to festivals including Rewire, CTM, and Sonic Acts, as well as museums including Neue Nationalgalerie and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, and will culminate in an upcoming double album. Originally developed 50 years ago by Serge Tcherepnin, the Serge Modular remains one of the most powerful and revered electronic instruments of the pre-digital era. Each of the rare Serge systems Ankersmit is visiting is unique and designed for different composers. Ankersmit conceives the project as a series of sonic portraits—each piece shaped by the architecture, history, and philosophy embedded in a specific instrument—bringing these otherwise isolated systems into dialogue for the first time. Unique among synthesizers of the era was the Serge system’s radical openness: free from any Western tonal conventions and allowing the user essentially unlimited access to its sonic potential. Today, it is enjoying a resurgence among a new generation of artists and listeners.
Robert Lippok
Robert Lippok has been testing art’s outermost edges for over four decades. His background at the costume department of the German State Opera in Berlin, the studies at the School of Art and Design Berlin-Weissensee, and the pioneering band projects Ornament und Verbrechen (1983) and To Rococo Rot (1995 – 2014) informed a transversal practice spanning from music composition, visual art, stage design, performance and costume design.
Experimenting with a wide range of music technologies, found objects and self-built instruments, Lippok’s pieces – whether an album or an interactive installation – have always transcended mere self-expression to address the role of art as a space-carving and architectural practice. Through the years, his works have been exhibited in the Palais de Tokyo, Neue National Galerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Gropius Bau and the 60th Venice Biennale amongst others.
Anushka Chkheidze
Anushka Chkheidze, born in 1997, is a Georgian artist. Growing up in the small village of Kharagauli, she started singing in a choir at the age of 11, and she describes that time as magical. She believes that her childhood years had a strong influence on her music.
In January 2019, she released her first tracks on the compilation Sleepers Poets Scientists, curated by Natalie Beridze, followed by her debut album Halfie in April 2020. Her second album, Move 20-21, was created during the pandemic and addresses the absence of physical movement and interaction with other people. It was released in February 2021. Immediately after a residency in Berlin as part of the Goethe-Nachwuchs programme, in collaboration with the Popkultur Festival 2022, she began a two-year Master’s programme in Music Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) in the Netherlands. Chkheidze continues to collaborate with choirs, resulting in a commission to compose for the highly regarded Gori Women’s Choir in Georgia at the Swiss-Georgian festival Close Encounters.
Georgian composer Anushka Chkheidze and Berlin-based sound artist Robert Lippok share a practice rooted in the sonic engagement with space—a leitmotif that runs through their respective bodies of work and defines their artistic dialogue. Chkheidze, based in the Netherlands, works at the intersection of composition, improvisation, and sound art, developing a musical language that is as rigorous as it is atmospheric. Both artists are known for their interdisciplinary approaches bridging music and visual art, and have exhibited and performed widely across Europe. The two first met in 2019 in Tbilisi and have since developed a collaborative practice built on spontaneity, mutual listening, and real-time composition. Their debut joint album »Uncontrollable Thoughts« (Morr Music) is the first document of this ongoing intergenerational dialogue. For their performance at ZiMMT Leipzig, Chkheidze and Lippok adapt the work they began at the Festival of Future Nows at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin—translating it into ZiMMT’s 3D- sound system.
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27. June: Svetlana Maraš · Başak Günak
3D Audio Concert · 7 pm (Doors open) / 8 pm (Start) · Admission: €15 (reg) / €10 (red) / €18 (soli)
Foto: Zlatko Mićić
Svetlana Maraš
Svetlana Maraš is a composer and sound artist working in the field of experimental music. Maraš is Professor of Creative Music Technology and Co-head of Electronic Studio at Hochschule für Musik FHNW, Basel. She is former head of Electronic Studio at Radio Belgrade. Maraš regularly performs live electronic music and this is part of her ongoing practice. Conceived as a hybrid technological instrument, her setup is focused on unlocking the hidden creative potential of commercial, affordable devices, enabling virtuosic real-time manipulation of electronic sound. She prioritises time-specific and contextual performance over the recording format, which she approaches critically and uses only selectively. Her work strongly focuses on sound installations such as Jazz, which employ existing technologies to construct complex signal-chain ecosystems. She also builds custom instruments, like Tablebook, merging her interest in objects, circuitry, performative interaction (by others), and sculpture.
Performance
Svetlana Maras’ live performances are an integral part of her ongoing practice, where she utilizes a variety of physical controllers in a concert setting, interpreting it as a space for experimentation and collective listening. These performances, conceived as a hybrid approach to using technology as an instrument, focus on designing playful and expressive interactions with affordable and accessible devices and gadgets, coupled with her interpretation of the ‘sound object’ as the smallest structural unit in electronic music. Her current setup embodies a state of ultimate patching that enables highly versatile traversal through different layers of musical form and performance configuration, made possible by adapting technology to her personal use. The result is a dynamic playground for exploration and engagement, firmly rooted in live, time-specific performances, distinctly removed from the format of a recording.
Başak Günak
Başak Günak is a sound artist and composer, internationally known as AH! KOSMOS in the field of electronic music. Her work includes sound art, performance, sound installation, composition for theater, contemporary dance and film. She released three solo LPs from Subtext, Compost Records & Denovali Records, two collaborative LPs and numerous EPs. Günak’s works have been featured worldwide in several festivals and institutions, such as Barbican Theatre, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Royal Theater Carré, Berlin CTM Festival, Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Prague Quadrennial, Tokyo EMAF and Oude Kerk. Her sound installations were shown at Sharjah Biennial 16, ARTER Istanbul and Galerist Istanbul. In recent years, she has composed for the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berliner Festspiele, Gropius-Bau Berlin and Kunstmuseum Basel. She has been invited to artist residencies at Callie’s Berlin, INA GRM Paris, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Elektronmusikstudion Stockholm, Bijloke Academy and HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts. Most recently, she was invited by the Dutch National Opera to perform her hybrid work.
Foto: Luka Aron
08. – 10. October: Christina Kubisch
Immersive sound installation
Hours: Tue–Fri: 5–8 pm / Sat & Sun: 2–8 pm
Guided tours: Sat & Sun at 4 pm
Admission: €5–10 (Free admission on Wednesdays)
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Christina Kubisch creates new acoustic ways of engaging with the environment through her interactive, spatial sound sculptures. At ZiMMT, she is exhibiting three of her unusual works. The walk-in installation “Signals in the Dark” uses a network of copper cables and special sensor headphones to make electromagnetic signals—which constantly surround us in our technology-driven daily lives but otherwise remain hidden—audible in an intensely rhythmic way. “Rapunzel” is, true to the fairy tale, a 40-meter-long braid of copper cables. Through 24 speakers, electromagnetic fields from modern neon signs intertwine with the much older sounds of a glass harmonica—which was used in the 18th century to treat nerve damage—depending on the listeners’ paths. The third work, “Groundfloor,” invites the listener to sit still and listen.
Christina Kubisch
Making new or hidden realities perceptible is a defining feature of Christina Kubisch’s extensive body of work. She has been working as a sound and media artist since the 1960s and has taught at several renowned art academies. Her installations are usually site-specific, seeking to create a complex spatial experience and seamlessly intertwining imagination and reality.
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31. October: Carsten Nikolai & Class
3D Audio Concert · 7 pm (Doors open) / 8 pm (Start) · Admission: €15 (reg) / €10 (red) / €18 (soli)
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Carsten Nikolai
Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto) is one of the most prominent international artists in the field of experimental sound art and is regarded as a pioneer in the use of digital media. Since the late 1990s, he has had a decisive influence on the intersection of art, architecture, and electronic music. Raster-Noton, the label he co-founded in 1999, has developed into one of the world’s most renowned platforms for minimalist, glitch-oriented sound aesthetics. In his artistic approach, Nicolai explores digital processes with formalistic precision—often inspired by mathematics, systems aesthetics, and minimalism. He works with recurring patterns, error structures, and serial algorithms that interweave sound, image, and space—in the process, sound is “made visible as code.”
Class Carsten Nikolai
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10. December – 18. January: Agostino di Scipio
Immersive sound installation
Hours: Tue–Fri: 5–8 pm / Sat & Sun: 2–8 pm
Guided tours: Sat & Sun at 4 pm
Admission: €5–10 (Free admission on Wednesdays)
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Agostino Di Scipio’s sound installations invite listeners to tune in more closely—to the space, to the surrounding environment, and to themselves. Using simple electroacoustic means, he creates a living system that responds to the sounds already present, including those brought in by the audience.
The installation is constantly evolving: it listens, adapts, and generates ever-changing sonic situations. The space becomes a shifting acoustic landscape where listening turns into a shared experience, connecting technology, environment, and the people within it.
Agostino di Scipio
Agostino Di Scipio is an Italian composer, sound artist, and a pioneer of electroacoustic music. Since the late 1980s, he has worked at the intersection of live electronics, sound installation, and spatial composition. His approach follows an ecosystemic model in which microphones, loudspeakers, and the resonances of a space interact through cybernetic feedback, dynamically shaping the sonic material—the space itself becomes an active sound generator. Di Scipio has developed this approach not only in works such as the sound installation Audible Ecosystemics, but also in theoretical writings, including Sound is the interface: from interactive to ecosystemic signal processing (Organised Sound, 2003), where he outlines models for how sonic ecologies can emerge directly within a space.
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