At a time when the term “remigration” is appearing more and more frequently in political discourse, the work “ Wissen im Zirkel” (Knowledge in the Circle) attempts to rethink this term.
Wissen im Zirkel is a long-term project that began with a Landis & Gyr research grant in 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Since 1990, Bulgaria’s population has declined from just under 9 million to around 6.8 million in 2022, with the majority migrating to the EU and the UK.
For the project, people in Bulgaria who had lived abroad for a long time and then decided to return to Bulgaria were interviewed. This resulted in an interview archive. This interview archive has been turned into an audio play in which migration is conceived not in national terms, but as a kind of exchange of knowledge and experience. The audio play explores issues of imbalance and invisible and minority forms of knowledge, experimenting with imitation as a form of exchange.
The audio recordings of starlings that had stopped in Sofia on their migration route play an important role in the radio play. Starlings are also known for their musical abilities to imitate other animals, humans, and technical devices. In addition to the pure radio play version, which is 45 minutes long, there is a live version of “Wissen im Zirkel” in which a prelude prepares the audience for a 20-minute abridged version. The prelude (overture) is derived from short excerpts from the interview archive and a Bulgarian folk song, and is performed live with self-developed software that algorithmically recomposes this material. You can hear starlings in Sofia, field recordings, bird call imitators, starlings imitating other birds and environmental sounds, digital bird calls, a singing synthesizer, and a singing AI.