Judith Hamann (AU, 1983)
Residency period: September-November 2025
Described as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE), Judith Hamann is a Berlin-based, Australian cellist and composer whose work encompasses performance, electro-acoustic composition, and microtonal systems in a process-based practice. In recent research, Hamann has examined shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters and interrogated the notion of “collapse” as a generative imaginary surface.
Hamann has performed widely at festivals including Tectonics (Glasgow, Athens), UnSound (NYC), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Maerzmusik (Berlin), CTM (Berlin), and the Venice Biennale Musica (Venice). She enjoys working with other artists, such as Marja Ahti, Pascale Criton, Charles Curtis, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Anike Joyce Sadiq. Her work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, and Another Timbre.
At La Becque, Judith Hamann will undertake creative research, exploring the phenomenon of desire paths as an intermingled architectural and musical metaphor, and as a concrete mark on a landscape. Drawing on research initiated in late 2023, the desire path as a collective form of altering a landscape holds within its image the potential for in depth musical exploration of reiterative music material (harmonic, melodic, gestural, or rhythmic). These modalities will be explored via a series of new compositions for cello, electronics, and voice. In tandem, Hamann will also work on a text exploring the desire path as a method of resistance and structural critique in terms of material and non-material landscapes.
Judith Hamann, photo Olle Holmberg