Convergence VII

The KROOSS COLLECTIVE welcomes you to its seventh edition, featuring a selection of innovative experimental artists working across disciplines. Come along and experience art and performances that push boundaries!


Line-up:

• aemlx
  
• TraumaZone
  
• NOESIS
  
• Constanza Castagnet & Zuza Banasińska
  

aemlx (they/theym, pronounced emil) operates on the spectrum between art and entertainment, playfulness and mourning, awkwardness and pathos. Through misuse of tools of expression and subversion of genres, they create intricate compositions that travel through noise and experimental songwriting, offering spells, confessions, jokes and commands.

Working across disciplines aemlx embodies various alter-egos that use humor and failure as modes of knowledge production, attempting to devise tools for navigating the world in reality of a system collapse.

They are also a co-creator of "Sabbath Berlin", an event series dedicated to presenting the culture and amplifying the voices of artists from Central-Eastern-Europe, the Slavic countries, the Baltic regions, the Balkans, the former Eastern-Bloc regions etc. and the creative director of a queer wrestling platform "Liminal Beast of Prey".


TraumaZone are a live-coding duo based in Berlin, consisting of Ksenia Sova, a video artist and Fyodor Stepanov, a sound designer. Their main focus is to politicize the art community by bringing to the spotlight important questions and creating a safe space for discussion.

As a collective they try to avoid the standard musician+VJ formula and strive to achieve the organic interaction and confluence of aural and visual elements, which means, even though each of them is responsible for their part during the development stage, they don’t have a clear division of tasks during our performances, but rather navigate their compositions together as a whole.

NOESIS is the collaborative duo of Andreea Hriscu (MIRE) and Silvia Laporta, merging dark ambient drone, live gong resonance, and embodied movement into an evolving, multisensory experience. Their performances unfold as ritual-like explorations of tension and release, entanglement and emergence, sound and body. For Convergence 7, they expand their practice with live painting, allowing the physical and sonic to imprint themselves onto canvas in real time.


Constanza Castagnet is an Amsterdam-based Argentine artist working at the intersection of experimental music, text, sound, and audiovisual performance. Her work explores voice, listening, and writing as tools to investigate the instability of language and perception. Focusing on the ambiguous and unrecognizable qualities of the voice, she uses its materiality to challenge its conventional role in conveying meaning. Through vocal experimentation, digital manipulation, and distortion, she places the voice in settings that feel both intimate and unsettling.

She holds an MA in Arts & Design from the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam (2021), and has exhibited internationally at venues including Tempel, De Thomas Kerk, and Het Hem (Amsterdam); PROA21, Festival Hyperlocal, CCK, and CNB (Buenos Aires); Les Instants Chavirés (Paris); ONOFF Gallery (Milan); and QO-2 (Brussels).


Zuza Banasińska is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, based in Amsterdam. In their practice, they are interested in the reproduction of images and how these enable the reproduction of systems, subjects and bodies. They engage with this theme through the lens of embodying and queering archives. In their essay films and installations, they employ a multi-layered approach that incorporates found and recorded video, game engines, sound, and sculpture to construct intricate ecosystems. These serve as spaces for interrogating and destabilizing entrenched notions of identity, gender, and representation.

They studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Their newest film, "Grandmamauntsistercat" premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024 and the 74th Berlinale, where it received the Teddy Award for best short film. It has now screened at over 70 film festivals, including New York Film Festival or Visions du Reel and winning 13 awards, most recently at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal. Their work is currently supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Netherlands Film Fund, and Stimuleringsfonds, and is distributed by Video Power and EYE Filmmuseum.