pomeloband

[pomeloband]

[pomeloband]

POMELO is a music collective based in Berlin; a place for art and reflection on migration, identity and social integration. The project is composed of four members with backgrounds in different disciplines, each bringing in a distinct, individual approach to sound producing and music making.

Pia Achternkamp is a musician and performance artist who works with music and sound as the basis of corporal and sensorial experimentation. Achternkamp is interested in the relationship between acoustic and electronic music, working with sound-landscapes as base for theatrical works, performances and artistic installations.

Jana Doudova, art theorist-curator and performance artist, works with themes such as social inclusion, migration and contemporary aesthetics, from a minimalist perspective Doudova experiences different formats of work, such as texts, objects and nature sounds collection as an engine in the musical and sound composition.

Melanie Garland, visual artist, her work focuses on the collection of urban memories through various archive formats, such as the collection of organic, architectural and sound materials. She is interest in topics like travel, human mobility, migration and the relationship between anthropology and biological concepts. Garland collects sounds and noises on her travels creating a sound landscape archive, which serven as a spatial memory that she uses in experimental and electronic music formats.

Bastian Manteuffel is geographer, anthropologist and musician. Mainly interested in urban research from an ethnographic perspective, recently Manteuffel is interested in the subject of smart city by questioning the technological solutionism, which claims to have universal answers for social problems. Emphasizing the embeddedness of technology within social agency, his work aims to destabilize technology as an alleged passive instrument for human intentions. Seeing also the music-making process as part of a socio-technical system, sounds provide a framework for him to experimentally elaborate on these ideas.

STATEMENT

POMELO work with the relationship between visual art, visual anthropology and sound landscapes, experimenting with sound and electronic formats. By not reproducing prewritten compositions, POMELO is especially interested in the creation process of sound and music as a space enabling to reflect upon questions of human and technical agency as well as the connection of each member and their role in the creative process.

POMELO connects electronic devices, acoustic instruments (guitar, double bass, accordion), (urban) field recordings, nature tone-material, mingled with processed samples of different musical genres. With each of these elements the compositions reflect the group's interest in experimentation, trial and error and the constant movement and flow of sounds. Each composition created, reflects the aesthetic and sensory perspective of urbanism in the city and the current problematics between human relationships and nature, the impossibility of communication and digital technology.

POMELO is interested in working with the "process" of the creation and sound composition itself, transforming the temporary space of the performance into a sound laboratory, tinkering with bits and pieces, which come into being the very moment when four people, technical and material devices sit together and dissolve into a somewhat collective intelligence where a harsh distinction between subjects and objects can barely be established.

Through this play with space and time of the fictional laboratory, POMELO is interested in connecting different creative systems, materials, organic and sound components, achieving different exchanges of information within the mind of the public. Being this laboratory of sound creation the perfect space to try to connect each instrument and element of the composition as a prothesis and interface of the reflection process of creation itself.