for the old

a collaborative work related 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 compose music based on these texts, with the freedom to draw on any aspect of Saâdane's work and offer a personal perspective on it. more information on the piece and excerpts can be found below.

the work largely stems from our collaboration w/ Kristia Michael and Rebecca Lane. premiered 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. curator: Gabriele Knapstein.

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

that one was a trip: 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.

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: drawing on a pre-existing American work from the 1980s, whose pristine quality carries an "anti-consumerist" aura, while exploring how its material might travel through time beyond its original context of display. for this reason, and because of its striking performance by Kristia Michael at Echonance Festival 2026, the piece draws on Three Voices (1982) by Morton Feldman. while acknowledging the differences between The New and Three Voices, i sensed in Feldman's piece a similar radical freshness and pristine, almost "anti-system" quality. composed around the same period as Koons' work, Three Voices holds a comparable meditation on presence and absence, decay, and a sense of being frozen in time, not least because it requires two pre-recorded vocal parts. as these were originally recorded by Joan La Barbara, her interpretation feels inseparable from the work itself—preserved, in a sense, since 1982. these were qualities I wanted to explore in the old, live.

a key part of the commission was preserving the lyrics surrounding The Old, each with its own voicing, length, meter, and poetic language. i made a personal cut of these texts, and worked similarly with Three Voices, sampling musical fragments and bars from it. together with Kristia and Rebecca, we shaped these fragments step by step, letting the impressions of Feldman's work resonate with those I'd felt wandering through Saâdane's exhibition. the aim was these the materials of these two works into dialogue: the implied sound of a vacuum cleaner, the lingering trace of the labor behind it, the coexistence of different temporalities, and the way individual voices slowly merge into one.

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