Commissions
Artworks and programmes commissioned by Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee
Speaker, Broker, Stringer
The Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee series “Speaker, Broker, Stringer’ critically engages with the notion of Werktreue, fidelity to an original text, and proposes distorted readings in opposition to the fetishization of authenticity. The series is curated by Arif Kornweitz. With support from Mondriaan Fonds and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst.
In 2024, we presented a new 56 min work by Aude Van Wyller (Oï les Ox):
Serrure Relax
"The nearly hour-long work stages an oneiric arcade of voices and lyrics, sung by Aude, spliced with covers of songs by Sonic Youth, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, Miles Davis, Earth, Wind & Fire and Ruth liberally sifted from YouTube “shred” videos, where users interpolate the sounds of music videos. Equally absurd and ingenious, the results lure you into a singular reading of the contemporary world, a place sensuously riddled with fake non-places and, in her own words, “clumsy mimesis” that come to inform the underlying sense that we’re all living in a simulation."
(Boomkat)
Suns Hollow / Neo Literal
In 2022, Ivan Cheng and Steven Warwick each received a commission for a new performance. Both pieces premiered in Perdu in Amsterdam.
Kareem Lotfy contributed original artwork.
SUNS HOLLOW
Stars Hollow is the name of the charming and fictional small town that television show Gilmore Girls deploys in contrast to the generational wealth of Hartford, Connecticut. Suns Hollow is a performative situation by Amsterdam based artist Ivan Cheng that amplifies and focuses on the theatricality of fandom.
Performed by Magdalena Mitterhofer and Ivan Cheng
featuring ‘Hundred Thousand Ways’ by Rui Ho
Garments: GOOD & BAD (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen)
NEO LITERAL (The Quest for Lyft Experience)
An epic poem set in the near future with bureaucrats sat around a table in a cabinet war room. Join Generals Intellect, Election, Abstraction, Enquiry and Anxiety, in a heated debate, attempting conflict resolution.
By Steven Warwick
Iconographies of Belonging
In the audio essay 'Iconographies of Belonging' artist Endi Tupja maps out several coordinates and journeys that others misread, questioned or were simply not interested in. Albania, the country where Tupja was born and grew up, is described as a place of belonging and longing that is constantly questioned: ‘where are you from? Go back to your East’. New fractured identities are born as a result.
Artun Alaska Arasli: Philoctetes: Rehearsals
An attempt to approach the radio play genre through what surrounds it, Philoctetes: Rehearsals (Act I) is the first act in imagining the processes of a non-existent play through the play's rehearsals and the life of its actors outside practice hours. Presented here in this first act is the beginning of its rehearsal processes: actors commute back and forth to the rehearsal space, and initial discussions are carried out to grasp the text. This radio play is made almost entirely out of found sounds, with occasional interjections by the artist.
Artun Alaska Arasli is a Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee resident.
The Sonic Experience of Life
A three-part series on embodied listening and non-verbal vocal expression, that brings together the sonic practices of Laraaji and Raoni Muzho Saleh, curated by Radna Rumping.
Laraaji is a musician, mystic and laughter-meditation practitioner based in New York City, who plays piano, zither and mbira. His musical career includes over 50 releases. He is also the creator and facilitator of Laughter Meditation Workshops, sharing the ‘seriously fun’ practice of heavy laughter as a transformative and ultimately healing tool for everyone. Raoni Muzho Saleh is a choreographer and performer based in Amsterdam. Born in Afghanistan and raised in Pakistan, his thinking and work is shaped by fugitivity as a radical movement. For this series Laraaji developed a 'Guided Laughther Release' and Raoni presented the work 'Gathering in a Polyphonic MOOOAAAAAANN Safeguards Solidarity'. The final episode is an intergenerational conversation between these two artists on collective sounding as a healing practice.
Listen here.
A collision with the past
“A collision with the past” is an audio essay by Alina Lupu, informed by a year-long attempt at approaching the history of the Kalenderpanden, a former squat located in the East of Amsterdam.
The piece uses archive material that the squatters from that time made available: a documented timeline of both the squatting and the eviction. It also tries to touch upon how the practice of squatting changed in the past decades, since the 2010 squatting ban, and weaves in and out of how one can still get access to the Kalenderpanden building, two decades after.
More about A collision with the past.
mo chuisle
mo chuisle develops her own interactive and generative musical interfaces and combines them with analog synths and transverse flute, creating mesmeric soundscapes in real-time. Repurposing environmental sounds together with deep, overlapping electro-acoustic tones, her sound abstractions tap into the resonating space between phenomenal and noumenal reality, evoking a sense of reflection and stillness.
This piece was part of our series of commissions for STRP Festival. Arif Kornweitz took care of this commission for Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee.
MF muun: a dj archeology
To conclude his residency at Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee in 2022, Emiddio Vasquez presents MF muun: a dj archeology, a backspin on his opening work nuum FM. Here he approaches radio through its “transmission-reception” operation in a dual form: its political character in the history of pirate radio and its ecological role in bat’s echolocation.
Ivan Cheng: Corpse Halo
A two part radio play on delusion and allegiance by Ivan Cheng, which features the voices and sounds of 12 string guitarist Julia Reidy and artist Alexander Iezzi. They read as Honey (Cheng), Paris (Reidy) and Kerry (Iezzi), with Kerry voicing stage instructions for the performance - titled MARKET HALO [winky’s hagiography] that Cheng and Reidy would have executed in a chapel at JJJNNN x STRP Festival in Eindhoven. With a text that continually defers and reframes value as belief system, they weave an elliptical meditation of being in and out of time.
This piece was part of a STRP Festival programme titled Body/Head, curated by Arif Kornweitz and Femke Dekker.
Extra-Sensory
How can you perceive something beyond your normal physical limits? Extra-Sensory is a three-part radio series about the multi-sensory nature of psychic perception developed by artist Susan Ploetz. The series includes a guided sensory awareness meditation and responses from listeners. Extra-Sensory is part of our longer commitment to embodied listening and the sensory potential of radio.
More about Extra-Sensory.