Artists shift into exploratory mode at Ultima 2025

A route to Ultima 2025

Archives, obsolete devices, and the vagaries of life all become raw material for new musical expressions in this year’s festival edition.

Navigating the sonic and emotional landscapes of Black communities, NEXCYIA lets daily struggles emerge as traces of something larger. Through field recordings, video footage and live performance, he weaves stories of resilience into our shared memory. Resilience—and joy—lie at the heart of Francis Alÿs’ video series Children’s Games. Radiant play unfolds in idyllic gardens, junkyards, and war-torn landscapes. Four composers respond to Alÿs, diving musically into the fantasy and seriousness of child play.

While NEXCYIA and Alÿs look outward, other artists delve into the very fabric of sound. Residual noise vibrates in Olga Kokcharova’s signal-to-noise ratio, echoing life’s unpredictable textures. In Labyrinthic Explanation of Knowledge by Ewa Jacobsson and Hilde Marie Holsen, sound pulses through a delicate circuit of broken audio parts, cat hair, marzipan, pearls, and more—forming connections that set the senses and imagination ablaze.

Somewhere between craft, research, and adventure lies the sonic theatre of Arturas Bumšteinas. Navigations is the result of his search through European theatres for historical weather machines. Musicians take the helm of these extraordinary contraptions, letting unpredictable weather shifts chart the course of their sonic voyage. 

Join us at Ultima 2025, where every experiment opens a new portal to the imagination!