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SELECTED WORKS 2023 - 2025

VIII.‘cow songs’ / Nikita Berezko x Sofia Norman

“A song for a cow
dead people dancing
a horny devil
memories that are not my own
words without a mouth
a mouth without a tongue
a field that smells like rust
sad pictures that are not grey

winter winter winter”

‘Cow Songs’ is a research on aural hauntings: vanishing oral traditions, lamenting rituals, and speculative archives through extended vocal practices and sonic fiction. The question central to this research is: How can speculative sound and storytelling function as alternative archival strategies for collective memory and disappearing acts? What does it mean to fictionalize memories? Can the absent—the ephemeral childhood memories, old VHS tapes, secret love letters from grandfathers we never met, folklore, and ghost stories - be reinvoked through sonic acts?

VII.‘TEMPTATION, unreleased’

CREDITS:

performed by: Merel Nuruwe & Maria Carrasco
choreography & direction: Misha Kazakov
live sound design & tech: Nikita Berezko
poster design: Jonas Riemersma
photography: Jona Meijer
videography: Dide Schuit

TEMPTATION, unreleased, is a duet performance work that makes use of technology and split staging to explore themes of absence, reciprocal influence, the imaginary and haunted body. The work is deeply influenced by hauntology, exploring how memories, traces, and echoes linger in the body and space even after they're gone.In TEMPTATION, the dancers are split between two separate locations, each of them having access to a live sound and video translation from of the other, but both of them seemingly unable to leave their assigned room. The full audience is present in only one of the rooms.
In a condition of physical deprivation, when one's access to the other is only possible through series of technological labyrinths, pathways and loopholes, the live feed of another space becomes both the supernatural power and a haunting, uncanny force. The work employs a system of audio- and video-capturing devices in order to investigate how physical traces of a body can undergo transmutations on their way from a source to a recipient, creating bewildering messages. The collected sound is manipulated and edited live in order to reveal its ghostly potential, alike to how supernatural presences are often portrayed to have powers to invade our 'material' realm. Thus, through instances of reciprocal technological interaction the tension between the physical and the spectral is explored. The dancers' ongoing dialogue with technology pulls them between presence and absence

[link to registration] (strobe warning)

VI.‘narcosonic drone gangbang’/ Nikita Berezko solo a/v noise show

“To capture the fugitive. To think that which resists thought. To think that which is where thought is not.
I came to fail. To the point of utter exhaustion— Where words failed me, Sounds failed me, The body was never enough or always too much, Thought struggled—because it is thought itself that presupposes the denoisification of reality. A categoremata, A net of concepts, Structures none of which are my own.
A plenum of voices, The signification of imaginary order, Reality always escaping and never grazing the Real. The silence of it all.
Thought is inherently against noise///}”

‘narcosonic drone gangbang’ is an a/v noise project dedicated to the exploration of sonic violence, surveillance technology and resistance.
It pushes both technical equipment and the body to their limits—to the point of exhaustion, media failure, and blown-out sound systems.The goal is to uncover the audio unconscious and to expose the weaponization and militaristic potential embedded in everyday objects and technologies.
Emerging from extensive research into military drone acoustics, LRADs, mosquito devices, and other tools of sonic control and spatial regulation, the performance mixes, remixes and displaces the violent potentiality of such sources. It redirects their intended use, embracing their negativity, repurposing sonic violence into a destabilizing state of sensory overflow.
The work features live generative visuals, broken FBI
archives, surveillance footage, real-time text output, homemade scrap-metal instruments, soul-crushing distorted beats, contorting flesh and shitty jokes.

excerpt documentation

LINK (strobe warning)

V.‘what does a drone sound like?’/ Nikita Berezko (narcosonic drone gangbang)

“all the voices lost in algorithms, recycled plastic and all the unethical labour that formed the organs of this non-mac-book-pro-elite on which the text is being typed, the electromagnetic radiation, the thermal heat signature of mushy brain radiating and leaving traces of my bodily fluids made visible by wonders of modern-day surveillance technology; will i be identified by my piss stains in the bathroom, bombed to precision, ripped to shreds, for it is the sound of my neighbours fucking clashing in freaquency merging spectrally with the ocean of cars and busy-girl-street-life outside my window on a carnival bright Sunday day that penetrates the thin wall of a cheap student apartment, thin see through walls and horrible heat insulation”

a study of modern military acoustics, hostile architecture, surveillance, sonic warfare and their ability to penetrate the flesh/world barrier. noise is a rupture — a failure of any medium to contain it. the work treats sound as a rupturing force: disrupting meaning, disrupting communication, erasing boundaries between the inner and the outer world. it is informed by the negative side of unwanted sound — from anti-homeless mosquito devices and samples of israeli drones hovering above Palestine to found scrap metal and diy instruments — and it uses that perceived negativity against itself. it subverts narratives and the normalized comfort of safely consuming theatre and music. noise is always already political.

modular synthesiser/ diy noise boxes/ guitar pedals/ contact mircrophones/ scrap metal/ live visuals/ feedback loops/

IV.research on plurality of noise(s): politics and poetics of the abject / Nikita Berezko - final research presentation for ArtEZ University of Arts

[link] to pdf of the documentation

[link] to an excerpt of a final presentation (strobe warning)

what and how is the power of noise? Or, more concretely: what is the response to and use of noise? What is the political-aesthetical use of the cacophonous, the disorderly and the paradoxical?

these were the initital questions for me, from there on a year-long journey into queer theory, ontology and glitch art followed. above are the links to final outcomes and documentation.

(…)to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, prohibited (Attali 1985 : 4)

My research deals with noise. My thought attempts to grasp something perpetually on the run — a shadowy omnipresence lurking under, over, and beside the aesthetic and epistemological judgments made on an everyday basis. Noise is contextual; it’s a hyperobject1. If ‘thought’ is understood as an inherently castrating, conceptualizing, and structuring activity, then, in some sense, one could claim that where thought is, noise is not. Thinking always leaves something out. To think is to unthink. To think is to forget, to exclude. Noise is the intrusion of that which has been left out, the effective revenge of the unthought, the disregarded.

III.‘variations on grieving’ | Nikita Berezko x Mikhail Kazakov

Developed and performed at PAF (Performing Arts Forum), France 2024.08.31.
Variations on Grieving were originally realized in the summer of 2024 during the residency at Performative Arts Forum in St-Erme as part of the Summer University’ 24 program.

The skeleton gives way toppling.
The grid of existence—you no longer have a reference point.
The structure that held you gives way, iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action,
thereby you are a rapidly descending lift, you are a rapidly descending lift, you are a rapidly descending lift,
where the site’s infrastructure or exterior has been eroded, of everything human, everything familiar.
When you fall, you fall through all the points of the body.
you are a rapidly descending lift,
You collapse.
where can I get
animal bones for free
can I put a screen in
a chicken wing
call it the virtuality of death
serene fluorescent light celestial harmonies
of the hospitalized self

II.autoerotic cacophonies/ solo a/v live set series

“as the hills dull into sands, and I make the stones bear my image, and the grounds rise from the ocean floor becoming mountains, and paintings in the gallery are either vertical or horizontal
now I have become the measure of the world
my voice will be stored securely
I will hide it in some virtual vault
swallowing the key
and I will echo throughout eternity
as my atoms collide and merge
and merge and collide
becoming a plantbased burger
for you to feast upon”

This series of a/v performances explores the interaction between immersive technology and media, the proliferation of signs through accumulation, and their relation to space and nostalgia. The performance generates live visuals in TouchDesigner, abstracted from real 3D scans of objects and places, merging and re-rendering them in real time. These visuals are accompanied by live sound manipulation, field recordings, and synthesizers. The set produces texts and landscapes that have never existed, fictional melodies and the imagined sounds of digital environments — merging scans of bones and rivers, seabeds and Lithuanian fossora with abandoned Soviet buildings and recordings of rain.

I.‘a place of silent contemplation’ | Inci Gül Civelekoglu x Nikita Berezko

“Sterile urbanized environment, a call for unwanted amateur exhibitionism outside the ‘pantheon’ of relics. Nomadic art-making, hostile architecture and immigration loosing self-image – let things die on their own terms. Acceptable forms of hoarding praised as archiving. Anonymous megaphone, disembodied voice:
I urge you to relive, to collect
I urge you to relive, to collect
To relive, to collect”

This work questions the ethical status of normalized institutional practices of archiving (art collection, deeming things to be of artistic value). Stressing the colonial history of museums and their oppressive functioning we investigate how repressive architecture shapes the body, structures bodily movements and otherwise enacts soft bio-political measures on an everyday level (anti-homeless hostile architecture, the silent rules of a museum, codified ways of art-consumption)

Credits
Concept: Inci Gül Civelekoglu, Nikita Berezko
Choreography: Inci Gül Civelekoglu, Nikita Berezko
Sound design/music: Nikita Berezko
Performance: Inci Gül Civelekoglu, Nikita Berezko
Text by: Inci Gül Civelekoglu, Nikita Berezko, Judith Butler, Thomas Moynihan
Supported by: ArtEz University of Arts, Museum Arnhem

© CARGO TEST 2027

NIKITA BEREZKO