Sara Koller and Matija Schellander (Switzerland): pulse


  • 19 Dec 2020 10pm UTC
  • dur 15min

Matija Schellander and Sara Koller met at a jazz festival in Austria and soon made plans to get involved with each other. The musician who tests the waters of performance art and the performance artist and meteorologist with speaking ambitions have spent two weeks rehearsing together. Both brought material from their fields, which results in a wild potpourri of sounds, lyrics, visuals, noises and body. The music performance is underlined by the audible live heartbeat, that serve as an unpredictable rhythm to the music. A specially programmed fluid dynamics animation runs in the background, showing wind currents over a mountain range, from which eddies repeatedly detach and decay. The text underlines the very personal Undine moments, when we are experiencing the balancing act called life.

camera: Noid Haberl
recorded at grillX, Vienna

BIO: Sara Koller is a performance artist and meteorologist and lives in Bern. Her performative work oscillates between dance, music and visual arts. She refers to the human body as the binding link between these artistic genres and medium. In her performative works she deals with the search for intimacy as a promise of solidarity in society. She sees herself as a political artist and works with unobtrusive commitment for a dignified coexistence in the field of political tension. Subtle and sensitive actions are her trademark, because it is her conviction that the subtle touches more sustainably and positively than the obviously provocative. ARTIST’S WEBSITE

Matija Schellander (born 1981 in Lud- mannsdorf-Bilčovs, Austria) studied double bass at the Conservatory of the City of Vienna and completed the course for com- puter music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His influences are manifold and range from Musique Con- crete to Hip-Hop, Techno, Improv, Jazz, New Music, Early Music, Traditional and Film Music. He works with instruments as well as field recordings, in the studio and on stage. Timbre, sampling, and a moving, organic sound image are central to sound as an independent artistic and narrative element. He lives and works as a composer, double bass player and electronic musician in Vienna and composes for music ensembles, theatre, contemporary dance and film. Together with Maja Osojnik, he is part of the electro-acoustic duo Rdeča Raketa, works regularly with the Italian sound artist Attila Faravelli and runs the trio Foreign Correspondents with Ryu Hankil from Seoul (electronic instruments, typewriter) and Noid (cello) from Vienna. His work and tours have taken him throughout Europe, North America and Asia. He has worked for many years with the theatre directors Ivna Zic and Franz-Xaver Mayr, including at the Theater Ulm, the Winkelwiese, the Roxy Birsfelden and the Schauspielhaus Wien, the Theater Basel and the Schauspielhaus Graz. The radio play ‘Wendy Pferd Tod Mexiko’ (first broadcast Ö1, January 2018) with the author Natascha Gangl and the musician Maja Osojnik received the prize for the best long radio play at the Berlin Radio Play Festival 2018 – this year the radio produc- tion ‘Die Revanche der Schlangenfrau – Femmage á Unica Zürn’ is being produced in the same constellation.