The Third Room, music performances series (2026)

Co-curator

Callie’s Berlin (EN)

Between January and May 2026, Callie’s Sound Studio opens to the public for the first time, transforming a production space into a site for collective listening. Over twelve evenings, four artists – Agnese Menguzzato, Hyunhye Angela Seo, Aida Shirazi, and Mariam Rezaei – each perform across three consecutive nights for audiences of about fourty people, entering the studio as it actually functions: not as a venue but as a zone of experimentation, accident, and discovery.

This is an invitation into process itself. The audience enters the space where decisions remain unmade, where technical mastery encounters its limits, where the work is deliberately unfinished. Each artist returns to a childhood instrument, Renaissance lute, piano, santoor, turntables, but not with nostalgia. These become archaeological tools, sites of excavation rather than preservation, methods for investigating cultural memory, diaspora, and institutional exclusion through experimental electronics and avant-garde composition.

All four artists navigate displacement or cultural hybridity. All challenge the institutions that decide who gets to make experimental music and how it should sound. Their practices occupy emotional territories often deemed inappropriate for serious composition: rage, apology, pain, fractured identity, grief, darkness. They refuse the palatable and the resolved, working instead in the raw space between technical precision and emotional intensity, where sound becomes a method for confronting what can’t be spoken.

Across three evolving sessions, each artist experiments with different collaborators, techniques, and the studio’s equipment, from acoustic diffusers to spatial interventions. No evening repeats. The studio’s treatment, designed for rehearsal and recording, shapes the sound but also exposes it. The equipment remains visible. The process stays audible. Nothing is hidden behind stagecraft or mystification.

By opening this production space to a small public, the series redefines what it means to witness artistic work. Listeners don’t consume a finished product but participate in ongoing research. The studio exposes the vulnerability of the unfinished as valuable rather than shameful. This transparency is structural: it refuses the false authority of the perfected outcome and offers something more challenging, the chance to inhabit uncertainty alongside the artist.

What emerges across these twelve evenings isn’t resolution but resonance: the particular quality of attention that forms when sound is allowed to remain fractured. The studio reveals itself as both instrument and accomplice. The gap between intention and outcome becomes the most generous place to listen from.

Schedule

January 29, 30, 31* @ 20:00 – Agnese Menguzzato (*with guest Petra Hermanova)

February 26, 27, 28* @ 20:00 – Hyunhye Angela Seo (*with guest freddie Murphy)

March 19, 20, 21 @ 20:00 – Aida Shirazi with guest Rey Kathami

May 21, 22, 23 @ 20:00 – Mariam Rezaei with guest Edward George

Details and tickets here.