INTERVIEW Michelle Michewicz
PUBLISHED 9 AUG 26
Anja Kreysing is a post-cinematic composer, focusing on exploring listening as a cinematic act through her work. She creates audiovisual environments, moving between expanded cinema, installation, and live performances by combining the accordion, electronics, field recordings, and layered video.
// How would you describe your artistic practice?
I am a post-cinematic composer whose work explores listening as a cinematic act.
Combining accordion, electronics, field recordings, and layered video, I create audiovisual environments that move between expanded cinema, installation, and live performance.
My electroacoustic- and real-time compositions investigate landscapes and architectures as sonic micro-geographies where perception itself becomes the central dramaturgy.
I perform internationally and co-curate the label schwarz-weiss ist die bessere farbe, dedicated to performative expanded cinema. I am also a Certified Deep Listening® Practitioner and an active collaborator in interdisciplinary and media-based projects that expand the field of cinematic listening.
// What is your artistic background, and how does it influence the way you approach art?
I studied fine art at Kunstakademie Münster but was always deep into practicing music. And I missed this deeply while trying to paint or make sculptures in the class of my first teacher, the German minimalist Rainer Ruthenbeck. In autumn 1990, the German sound artist Christina Kubisch held an ongoing sound art workshop over half a year at my art school.
This was my missing link! I instantly dived deep into sound installations and electroacoustic tape composition, switched to the class of the German Fluxus filmmaker Lutz Mommartz, and after some years in sound installations and tape compositions I decided to develop a live practice with accordion and electronics, too.
While making my studies along the experimental film- and video students, my artistic approach to sound went more and more cinematic. Non-linear storytelling and the balance between noise and traditional musical elements became more and more important and at last crucial. I studied structured, abstract improvisation and real-time composition with the Canadian violinist Malcolm Goldstein, and I made a lot of live soundtracks for historic silent films to train my skills. I also started to produce my own video-compositions with experimental video and determined soundtrack compositions.
These video compositions usually exist in a version without live interventions, just for the screen, and versions with live interventions like I did at SEE Djerba 25 and will do now at SEE Djerba 26. So cinematic thinking and cinematic perception/listening in expanded cinema environments is, since the mid-1990s, my main artistic field.
// How do you usually work? Can you describe your creative process?
Usually I start with a concept when something drives me, or there is a commissioned work. I collect ideas and invent artistic research, read books and articles, study other artists, and so on.
If I am producing with visuals, I mostly go on with collecting visuals and field recordings for the audio composition.
In my studio, I scan this collection, and I develop the visual language for the actual artwork. Visual work needs much more producing time than the pure audio work btw.
In parallel, I start with the composition. At last I put everything together, fine-tune image and sound.
// How do you know when a work is finished?
I stop if there is 5-10% “unpolished feeling” leftover. Too perfect/polished is not my style; I need a certain amount of rawness. That is one of the reasons I often sketch into the video work and animate these sketches.
To give myself restrictions in an artistic process helps a lot, too, to identify the moments when a work is finished.
// What is your contribution to SEE DJERBA 2026, and how is it connected to this year’s theme, Akros/Entanglement?
My contribution to SEE DJERBA 2026 is the expanded cinema performance for fixed moving image with soundtrack and an additional live soundtrack, “Driftlines: The Maltese Interval“.
The project begins with a series of contemporary photographs of the mostly abandoned Maltese houses in Houmt Souk, Djerba.
Built by Maltese families who settled on the island during the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
these buildings remain as traces of a temporary encounter between cultures, landscapes and ways of living.
Rather than reconstructing this history, the work approaches the houses as sites where architectural, ecological, social and temporal trajectories continue to intersect.
These contemporary photographs are transformed through digital image processing and hand-drawn interventions into an abstract audiovisual composition that unfolds between documentary trace and imagined space.
A live soundtrack for accordion and sine tones accompanies the projection, creating a shifting field of resonance rather than illustration.
The work explores how places continue to carry residual relations long after the events that produced them have passed.
Instead of presenting migration or memory as narrative, it composes a perceptual space in which movement, encounter and absence remain
present as subtle tensions within image and sound.
Conceived specifically for SEE DJERBA and the theme AKROS – from encounter to entanglement, “Driftlines: The Maltese Interval” proposes entanglement not as a visible network but as an invisible field of relationships that continues to inhabit architecture, landscape and perception.
// What conversations do you hope your work will start?
I hope my work gains curiosity and awareness of the traces and the life of the Maltese people disappearing after roughly 150 years living on Djerba without answering too many questions.
I think there is no final answer needed to empathize with a population coming and going, leaving only some mostly ruined traces.
Perhaps some older people still have some memories. Who were these people from Malta, and what was their status, their mindset?
// What does entanglement mean to you?
Believing that all life forms are entangled with all the other life forms and essentially entangled with God / Allah …
// Is there a material, image, or symbol that you associate with entanglement?
Rhizomes & mushrooms, felt, a cross
// Do you think art should ask questions, provide answers, or both?
Art should ask questions but mustn’t give answers at all. The unexpected is always exciting.
// What inspires you outside the art world?
My family, with my children and our cat and our dog.
Good, simple, healthy food. Landscape.
Believing that all life forms are entangled with all the other life forms and essentially entangled with God / Allah is one of my biggest inspirations, too.