Joana Naomi Welteke

Joana lives and studies in Hamburg (DE) since 2017. In her school years, she gained diverse experience in dance, circus and music. Joana specialised in music during her Bachelor’s degree in “Expressive Arts in Social Transformation”, which she successfully completed at the MSH Medical School Hamburg 2020.

In projects with Nadja Rix, sound recording takes on central importance as a compositional tool. As an artist duo (echo.urban GbR), they collect acoustic material and transform it into audible, publicly available artwork. The socio-artistic aspect in their work becomes clear in the workshop format “die Soundsammler” (“the sound collector”) and their participatory installation “record-o-mat”.

In her works, Joana creates a reference to the everyday, to topics of daily life and social issues, to public space and local people. How can artistic experiences be integrated into everyday life, how can access be opened up further? Currently, she is on the search for innovative, participatory formats of bringing her work to the public space.

Since 2019, Joana has been experimenting with technology and programming composition tools. In doing so, she is attracted to the interplay between contemporary media technology and emergent improvisational practice. Joana also works in close collaboration with the streetperformance company OAKLEAF Streetshow. Joint productions include “O-lectic”: an interactive bodypercussion performance on stilts with sampled sounds and voice, “Chaturanga”: a life-size and participatory chessboard intertwining action, installation and digital, and together with Tina Säck and Arjun Jamil the project “Cubes of Communication” funded by the Fonds darstellende Künste: an multifaceted, explorative format to enable interactive and artistic engagement.

Joana is currently studying for a Master’s degree in Sound/Vision at HAW Hamburg and is a founding member of the “Labor für forschende Improvisationspraxis” (research lab for improvisational practice).