The starting point of this work was the question of corporeal presence in the context of new music in the age of digital technology, sampling, recording and artificial intelligence. What is the role of the performer that goes beyond the realisation of a score? What is this extra that corporeality brings in the context of a score? Is corporeality formable, composable and controllable like a musical material? We wanted to place presence on the threshold of absence and thereby make it more experiential.

In the course of the work, it became increasingly clear to us that this question does not only arise for us in the context of new music, but must also be reflected upon from a personal perspective.

We became aware of a certain absurdity of this arrangement: two migrants from Russia sit in a wooden box in Berlin Mitte and address a problem of new music that is probably not a problem at all for many. This was a catalyst for thinking about the question from an autobiographical perspective as well.

What does presence mean geographically and culturally? What is the effect of migration as a geographical move? What is the meaning of this conflict between the absolute repulsion of the state that has started a war of aggression in violation of international law and the appreciation of the places in which we were socialised?

The room-in-room is a metaphor for the threshold between presence and absence, between disgust and appreciation, a metaphor for the bubble in which we live and which makes possible the privilege of asking these questions in the first place.

Simple Present consists of feedbacks not only in acoustic but also in poetic space: between presences, sounds, audio and video documents from our private archives, between the past and the present.

Funded by initiative neue musik berlin e.V.