Ingrid Hoelzl (Hamburg) / Artistic direction: Research/dramaturgy; video/text/sound; voice/clarinet; performance
Transmedia artist, theorist and musician based in Hamburg creating work under the label General Humanity. Member of the Dachverband Darstellende Künste Hamburg and from 2019-22 member of the VAMH organizing team. Her artistic work has been supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste, the Musikfonds, the Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung. Recent performances: EU, IROKO (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia, Salvador, 2024); Transcorporação (Theatre, Goethe-Institute Salvador-Bahia, 2024); PanEros (TONALi-Saal, Hamburg, 2023). Upcoming: Trance/Gender/Multiple Me (TONALi-Saal, 2025).
As an Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media Hong Kong, she was founding member of Algorithmic Glitch Ensemble and Archetype Ensemble and member of Floating Projects where she curated “Interspecies Musicking” in 2017. Performances solo and with experimental musicians and dancers in Asia and Europe, including at XP, Beijing (2015); Kill the Silence / LUFF does Hong Kong Festival (2016); THE BOOK OF DAUGHTERS Festival (2017); and WIM Zurich (2019).
From 2020-23 she directed four mulitmedia performances as part of blurred edges: ANIMAL ANCESTOR (2020); PEAK HUMANITY (2021; funding: Musikfonds / Neustart Kultur); EARTH PULSE / FUTURE EVE (2022); and PanEros (2023). In 2024, as a Visiting Professor at the Escola de Teatro der Universidade Federal da Bahia funded by the Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg she conducted the performance project Eu/meus Orixás.
Film works include EARTH PULSE – A Sonic and Performative Meditation on the Schumann Resonance (2022, Screenings: Teatro por el fin del Mundo, Tampico, MX; Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, CO) and Transcorporation. States Beyond the Self (2025, Screenings: Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, FR; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Bahia, Salvador, BR) as well as the two-part experimental film on acoustic resonance, Manifiesta por la vida – en cinco actos (2022), I cried into the forest and it laughed back at me (2021), and videos created for her performances, such as Time of the Abyss (2021) and Me, Josephine (2020). See Video works (vimeo).
Her label General Humanity Musicking unites free improvisation and transspecies sound rituals (RUIDO DIVINO, 2022; musical collaboration: Rafael Andrade) and complex compositions: The album PEAK HUMANITY (2021; musical collaboration: Georgia Hoppe, Frantz Loriot and Marcia Lemke-Kern) experiments with octatonics; the album FUTURE EVE (2022; musical collaboration: Heloise Francesconi) mixes human and artificial voices with modular synth sounds, and the four-channel audio installation PAN-EROS (2023; musical collaboration: Luis Fernando Franco Duque) merges the voices of four women with the sounds of the Sierra Madre de Santa Marta, Colombia.
GeneralHumanityMusicking (bandcamp label); Video works (vimeo); Scholarly works
Composition/Performance: Dong Zhou (Hamburg)
Dong Zhou (no pronoun/she) is a composer and performer. Zhou received her B.A. (Music Design) from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and her M.A. (Multimedia Composition) from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, under Professor Dr. Georg Hajdu and Professor Elmar Lampson. Zhou is currently doing her doctorate at Leuphana University under Professor Dr. Rolf Großmann. Since 2019, Zhou has held teaching positions at HfMT Cologne (Technology for Composition), HfMT Hamburg (Max Zero) and Leuphana University Lüneburg (Interactive Sound Installation, Environmental Composition, Aesthetic Practices of the Soundscape in Auditive Culture), among others. Zhou was a resident artist at BIP in 2023, funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste; in 2022 she received the Zukunftsstipendium Musik from Landesmusikrat Hamburg and in 2021 the Stipendium Künstlerische Intervention from Hildesheim University. Zhou has received commissions from the Shanghai International Art Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe and won prizes at the Nota-n-Ear Awards (2022) and Emily Dickinson in Music Composition Competition (2023), among others. In 2019, Zhou reached the final of the German Music Competition and in 2018 she won first prize at the ICMC Hacker-N-Makerthon.
Credit_ThomasZydatis
Her current work focuses on love and sexuality: she created the electronic composition/intervention for La Traviata – Eine Auferstehung directed by Kerstin Steeb (premiere Theater Lüneburg, November 24), in which sex work activist Salomé Balthus (text/voice) questions bourgeois double standards. She is also the composer for Fernanda Ortiz’s participatory choreographic game, DEEP DEEP LOVE (Kampnagel, February 25). Dong Zhou created the performative lecture “(un)kill the Putas” together with the Dolce Diva Collective (Lichthof Theater, March 25). The work addresses femicide and the fear FLINTA people experience every day.
https://dongzhou.live; https://dongzhou.bandcamp.com
Composition/Live-electronics: Héloïse Francesconi
Heloise Francesconi is an electronic composer and musician based in Marseille, France. Her compositions are inspired by concrete music, ambient, industrial and noise. She holds a diploma in electroacoustic composition from the Conservatory of Nice (2021). Between 2018 and 2020 she was part of the analog and modular synthesizers trio HHH. Most of her performances took place in museums (MAMAC, MAA etc.) and alternative art spaces. She is now playing the electric guitar in the experimental noise-rock band TORU which will go on tour with the legendary US band Cave in September 2025. She collaborates with various artists (authors, ceramists, musicians) with live electronics, voice, guitar, and composition, including the film EARTH PULSE by Ingrid Hoelzl (2022), the performance FUTURE EVE (blurred edges 2022) and the split releases TORU/BRUTALISM (arsenic.solaris, 2025) and Heloise Francesconi – Croisette & Mtua – Musette (Groovedgee, 2024).
SOUND INSTALLATIONS: Musique pour sculptures creuses, Atelier Smarin, Nice, 2021, with Léonore Chastagner (ceramics artist) and Sarah Procissi (musician); 2019: Sound installation @ festival OVNI, Nice; 2018: Sound installation with trio HHH on 12.1 system, MAMAC, Nice; TOURS/FESTIVAL: 2025: European tour with band Toru and tour in France with Nyet Nyet Nyet; solo live electronics with modular synth @ L’écurie, Genève and Klub Famu, Prague; 2024: live electronics solo tour in Russia and shows at Festival Mordor and Festival Scellés; 2023: Festival Illusion: presentation of electronic piece Croisette. RESIDENCIES: Atelier Experimental, Nice, 2025 (with artist Sean Drewry): psychoacoustic experimentation using infrarabass produced with oscillateurs; CNCM le Grame, 2025: turntablism research and concert with NYET NYET NYET; L’embobineuse, Marseille, 2025: creation of an acousmonium (orchestra of amplifiers) and live-set with 15 musicians and composers; Galerie Hinterconti, DE, 2022: composition, live-electronics and voice for multimedia performance FUTURE EVE @ blurred edges 2022 (with Ingrid Hoelzl and Bianca Hein); Souyanas/FR; Hamburg, DE, 2021: field recording/ performance/composition for experimental film EARTH PULSE by Ingrid Hoelzl; Melismas, Turkey, 2021: with sound artist Christian Galarreta: psychoacoustic study of sound deformations according to place of listening.
https://heloisefrancesconi.bandcamp.com
Performance/voice: Maria Todorova
Maria Todorova was born in Bulgaria, graduated in education and worked as a primary school teacher. Her life took her out of the saddle several times, which gave her the opportunity to develop her career in international companies. After moving to Germany, she found her way back to childcare and continued to develop as a curative educator, language specialist and specialist in health and movement promotion. Her passion is working with children with conspicuous behavior and this is reflected in her everyday life. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and getting to know new cultures. Maria dances Lindy Hop and Forró as part of her personal journey of healing from relational trauma.
Video editing: Carl Weidner (Hamburg)
Photographer, videographer, musician based in Hamburg. Carl studied photography and art at Art Academy St. Joost in Breda, Netherlands. After his studies Carl moved into live video performance and multi-media installations, as well as camera work, sound design, post production/colour grading/visual effects and music for short films, as well as production work for various culture institutions, such as V2_institute and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival DEAf. From the mid 2000’s Carl was an integral part of the mobile culture project MS Stubnitz where he was co-responsible for the video documentation and the booking/curation while the project was residing in Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Bremen, Aarhus, Rotterdam and Rostock. As a curator Carl took great care in programming artists with interdisciplinary approaches, in particular performance and music theatre concerned with feminism, cultural identity and political suppression. He has a strong interest in ritualistic performance, and, among others, programmed PUTAN CLUB aka Ndox Electrique (a post-industrial music project based in Senegalese possession rituals) for the MS Stubnitz, in 2021 and 2023. Carl created the trailer to PanEros and did the postproduction of the film Transcorporation. States beyond the Self (2024).
https://www.facebook.com/carl.weidner.ccw
Electronics/Theory: Gabriele de Seta
Gabriele de Seta aka Naturalismo is a media anthropologist, artist and experimental musician. He holds a PhD in sociology from the Polytechnical University Hong Kong and is currently based in Bergen where he runs a research group as a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Culture Unit of the University of Bergen. Gabriele has contributed to the General Humanity Blog as a translator and will continue to be involved.
From 2007-2017 he ran the experimental label Monstres par Excès and in April 2020 he released his album Elegie on Sotajazz, the first installment in the label’s Death Series. Elegie consists of three compositions for recently deceased artists, the first of which, L’Ultima Fossa (“the last ditch”), is a slow ambient dirge for Zev Asher (1963-2013). De Seta (aka Caligine) and Ingrid Hoelzl (aka Arkajolie) have met in Hong Kong in 2015 and collaborated on various live performances and albums, some of which are released on General Humanity Musicking.
Anthropological advice: Arnaud Halloy (Nice, France)
Maître de Conférence Habilité à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) in Ethnology/Anthropology, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, member of the Cognitive, Clinical and Social Anthropology and Psychology Laboratory LAPCOS (EA 7278), Université Côte d’Azur. 2021 Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Université́ Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL), PhD in 2005, title of thesis: Dans l’intimité des orixás. Corps, rituel et apprentissage religieux dans une famille de saints à Recife (Brésil). Since 1997, Halloy conducts regular ethnographic fieldwork and publications on the Xangô cult of Recife, in particular focussing on aspects of learning and stimulation involved, and taking his own inititation and possession as an object of study: “Un anthropologue en transe. Du corps comme outil d’investigation ethnographique” [An Anthroplogist in Trance. The Body as a Means of Anthropological Investigation].
GENERAL HUMANITY 