CONVERGENCE 9: Reading and Performance

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

KROSS COLLECTIVE presents: CONVERGENCE IX, an evening of immersive performances where sound, text, and visuals interweave to create a unique sensory experience.

For our ninth edition, we welcome visual artist Keiji Matsuoka from Japan who will perform with musician Makoto Sakamoto. drusnoise & Erbse will present their performance piece ‘Can you hear the Earth breathing?’, framed around improvisation, dissolving human-nature boundaries, and decentering the western concept of ‘the human’ in performance. Rounding off the evening are the collective akademische Noise, hoch qualifiziertes Poetry (Laura Leiner, Rocío Rodríguez and Elsye Suquilanda), and Kross Collective co-founder MIRE.

Keiji Matsuoka is a visual artist from Japan. Focusing mainly on the fluid movement of liquids, he creates improvised visual performances that project live drawings using paper, wire, brushes, glass and other objects. The flow and mixing of liquids is full of chance and improvisation, and he has collaborated with many musicians, dancers and performers both in Japan and abroad. His unique theme of ambiguous boundaries allows him to express unconscious sensations and changes in consciousness. In his solo performances, he performs visual and sound simultaneously in a style he calls "Drawing Drone."

Makoto Sakamoto is a Japanese sound artist and improvisational performer based in Berlin, working at the intersection of electronic and experimental music. He explores the relationship between sound, space, and human perception, often using real-time synthesis across multiple hardware synthesizers. His improvisational approach invites people unexpected incidents, blending waveforms and electronics sound textures into tactile, raw sonic experiences. This method emphasizes the immediacy and physicality of sound, resulting in performances and compositions that are both responsive and immersive.

MIRE is the sound project of Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist Andreea Hriscu, co-founder of Kross Collective. Working across dark ambient, drone, and noise, MIRE sculpts long-form, improvised compositions using synthesizers, computer processes, and field recordings. The result is immersive soundscapes shaped like fluid architecture — both intimate and immense, suspended between industrial decay and subaquatic stillness.

Described as “music forged in flooded ruins” and “a jagged key to a utopian mirage,” MIRE’s sonic world shimmers with tension between structure and entropy, silence and obliteration. Releases include “We Left No Message” (LOUDsilence) and “All That Time” with Grabschlamm (ArrhythNia), alongside over a dozen independent works. Past performances span Convergence, Hosek Contemporary, and Poetic Hafla — with each act an ephemeral organism, whispered once, then gone.

akademische Noise, hoch qualifiziertes Poetry born by way of rebellion, has its roots to manifest the opposite to the “established” enjoyment through noise, punk, rock, mantras, sounds, immersed with live audiovisual work creating different scenarios where the viewer will be transported to different universes of the hand of posthumanist poetry recited and sung in multilanguage, including animal language, voices and movements of all of us.

Elsye Suquilanda is a posthumanist poet, filmmaker and performance artist, co-creator of the Dogsofia Chichoismo. Her art raises awareness about human and animal rights as well as the natural environment. Rituals, courage, reality-fantasy, humor intertwined with unique costumes, audiovisuals, chants embracing different rhythms such as chanson, punk, metal, rock, pasillo, techno, noise, ska, mantras.

Laura.aLL is a guitarist, experimental composer and curator. As well as playing guitar in different contexts, ranging from ambient music, noise and trip rock, she works with diverse experimental settings, exploring the sound of strings, objects or public spaces, using effects, synthesizers, field recordings or recycled instruments.

Rocío Rodríguez is a video artist and videographer specializing in performance. She began her academic journey studying dance, followed by film and communication, ultimately earning a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Culture. Her work investigates the intersection of live performance with innovative techniques and technologies, aiming to expand the ways in which performance can be experienced audiovisually.

Erbse (no/ all pronouns) is active in the fields of visual arts, music, dance and philosophy, is queerfeminist, is learning, exploring and experimenting, attempting to create interconnectivity and a blurring of boundaries as resistances. Erbse is based in Berlin and Bremen and currently prefers to work with dance and social sculptures. Steve Williams aka drusnoise is a live, electronic music producer, sound artist and curator of sustain.fm. drusnoise integrates analog modular synthesizers with digital FX and organic samples to create a style that flows from lush ambient tones to gritty techno. Known in the outside world as Dr. Steve Williams, his academic work includes conducting and publishing research on sustainable energy transition, energy justice, and sociomaterial acoustic methods in Canada, Germany, Norway, and Sweden