[axiomata media] II.
—
RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR VOCALISTS AND CHOIRS
[October 2026 – June 2027]
SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE
Performance as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Futures
An international residency investigating the historical lineages, present conditions, and future trajectories of vocal and choral performance.
PROGRAM AT A GLANCE
Program period: October 2026–June 2027
Format: Four online seminars followed by an on-site residency
Stage I: October 2026 | Two online seminars
Stage II: December 2026 | Two online seminars
Stage III: June 2027 | On-site residency and public presentations
Location: Bled, Slovenia (EU)
Final presentation: Seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week
Application deadline: October 15, 2026
—
FORMAT
Stage I. | October 19, 20, 2026
- 2 online seminars
- Vocalists and choirs present their artistic practices, performance methodologies, and works in progress
- Q&A
Stage II. | December 16, 17, 2026
- 2 online seminars
- Critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation centered on SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Musical Knowledge
Stage III. | June 14-25, 2027
- Performances, lecture-performances, vocal laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia
—
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
[axiomata media] is an international, process-oriented residency for vocalists, vocal ensembles, and choirs investigating performance as a form of musical knowledge.
The program proceeds from a precise proposition: vocal and choral performance does not merely reproduce knowledge established in a score, text, archive, compositional plan, or convention. It generates, tests, transmits, and revises knowledge through breathing, voicing, listening, interpreting, remembering, coordinating, and deciding together. Performance is therefore a situated process through which musical relations become perceptible and transformable.
The voice is approached neither as a self-evident natural instrument nor as a neutral carrier of musical content. Every vocal act emerges through interactions among anatomy, breath, sensation, language, training, memory, repertoire, technology, environment, and social convention. Every choral act further depends upon the organization of difference among bodies, timbres, histories, capacities, interpretative positions, and modes of attention.
Extending from October 2026 to June 2027, the residency combines four online seminars with an on-site phase at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia. This continuity enables participants to articulate methodologies, situate work historically, test propositions, revise assumptions, and develop public presentations.
Participants may develop performances, recordings, lecture-performances, vocal laboratories, artistic research, writing, or documentary formats. Projects may enter as initial questions, works in progress, established practices requiring re-examination, archival inquiries, or experimental propositions.
The residency is organized around three interdependent fields:
SOURCE concerns the conditions, inheritances, materials, histories, institutions, and relations from which vocal and choral performance emerges.
SUBSTANCE examines the embodied, sonic, physiological, linguistic, technological, spatial, and perceptual constitution of vocal practice.
STRUCTURE traces the processes through which musical actions and relations acquire coherence, distribute agency, generate form, and transform over time.
These terms do not prescribe a theme to be illustrated. They establish a shared analytical vocabulary through which heterogeneous practices may be articulated, compared, questioned, and developed.
The program welcomes contemporary, traditional, experimental, notated, oral, improvised, interdisciplinary, electroacoustic, site-responsive, community-based, and hybrid practices. No single aesthetic, repertoire, technique, ensemble model, or relation to notation is privileged. Participants examine what knowledge their practices enact, which assumptions they reproduce or contest, and what future configurations they may enable.
The residency culminates at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week through performances, lecture-performances, vocal laboratories, artistic research presentations, recordings, or hybrid formats.
—
MENTORS
Dr. Alastair White
Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.
Dr. Niki Zohdi
Dr. Dré A. Hočevar
COORDINATOR
Brina Kren
DATES
MENTORS
ARTISTIC AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL PREMISE
GENEALOGIES AND FUTURES
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
WHO THE RESIDENCY IS FOR
PROGRAM STRUCTURE
MODES OF WORK
ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES
WHY PARTICIPATE?
APPLICATION
APPLICATION FORM AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The [axiomata media] program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io