for the old

a commissioned piece in relation to Saâdane Afif's constellation of texts and piece The Old at the Hamburger Bahnhof; itself based on Jeff Koons' series The New. 12 texts were written in response to The Old, all engaging with the decline of objects, bodies, and societal models. i was commissioned to write music based on those texts, while being free to take inspiration from any aspect of Saâdane's work and simply convey a personal gaze on the work. you can find some extensive info about the piece below.

w/ Kristia Michael and Rebecca Lane, and a special concert at KM28 on June 23rd 2026 organized through the shared effort of: Freunde* Guter Musik Berlin e. V. in cooperation with Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart and KM28.

header photo: The Old, 2025 © Saâdane Afif, 2025 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of the artist & Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin. Photo: Jacopo La Forgia

curator: Gabriele Knapstein. made possible by Hauptstadtkulturfonds. Supported by FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof International Companions e. V.

that one was a trip. shortly after moving to Berlin, i was invited to write a new work featuring the texts from Saâdane Afif's The Old, 2025. beyond treating those texts with care and ensuring their faithful transmission, i was fortunately given carte blanche in approaching the rest of the piece—from its instrumentation to its aesthetic direction and overall form.

the starting point for this piece lies in Saâdane’s methodology: taking inspiration from a pre-existing American work from the 1980s, whose pristine quality carries a certain “anti-consumerist” aura, while exploring how its material might travel through time beyond its original context of display.

for this reason, as well as its spectacular performance by Kristia Michael during Echonance Festival 2026, the piece draws inspiration from Three Voices (1982) by Morton Feldman. while acknowledging the fundamental differences between The New and Three Voices, I felt that Feldman’s piece shares a similar radical freshness and pristine, almost “anti-system” quality. composed around the same period as Koons’ work, Three Voices also possesses a comparable contemplation on presence/absence, decay and a sense of being “frozen in time,” especially as it requires two pre-recorded vocal parts. because these recordings were originally made by Joan La Barbara, her interpretation often feels inseparable from the work itself—preserved, as it were, in the recordings from 1982. these were qualities I wanted to explore in The Old, Live.

in addition, I was interested in conveying my impressions of Saâdane’s The Old, which were not unlike Feldman's description of his experience of Three Voices: “an exchange of the live voice and the ones which are absent.” to me, The Old similarly creates a space where one encounters traces of voices from Koons, Saâdane, and all the artists whose lyrics appear in the work.

as mentioned above, one important aspect of the commission was to preserve the lyrics surrounding The Old, which all had unique voicing, lengths, meters, poetic languages. i did cut a personal cut-off of those texts, keeping fragments that stayed with me after visiting Sadaâne's exhibition. i proceeded in a similar way and 'sampled' musical fragments or bars from Three Voices. together with Kristia and Rebecca, we worked through these fragments step by step, exploring how the impressions suggested by Feldman’s work might resonate with those I experienced while meandering through Saâdane’s exhibition. the aim was not to recreate either work, but to bring their materials into dialogue: the implied sound of the vacuum cleaner, the lingering presence of the labour associated with it, the coexistence of different temporalities, and the way individual voices gradually merge into a collective one.

to summarize: this piece is the result from a synthesis between unused and used vacuum cleaners, 2 pioneer American artists, 2 French artists from Algerian origins, 12 texts, Three voices and 3 women, and all those spaces in art and music where traces, memories, and presences accumulate. what emerges is a reflection on the passage of time and the marks and insights it inevitably leaves on us. something along those lines

i'm thankful for Saâdane and Gabriele's trust, as much as Kristia and Bec's involvement in the creation of the piece.