When Sound Becomes a Diagnostic for Ecological Anxiety
The Klangdom at ZKM Karlsruhe is not a neutral space. It is a dome of 43 speakers arranged in a hemisphere, designed to place listeners inside sound rather than in front of it. On April 30, 2026, two artists will use this architecture to do something that matters beyond the concert hall: they will make ecological fragility audible.
TURNS ECO/EXO: SCREAMING VIBRATION brings together Lila-Zoé Krauß (performing as L Twills) and Rojin Sharafi for an evening that sits at the intersection of experimental music, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental crisis. The event is part of ZKM's ongoing TURNS concert series, curated by Dr. Lea Luka Sikau, which has been transforming the Klangdom into a laboratory for immersive listening since 2025.
But here's the thing worth noticing: this isn't just a concert. It's a cultural artifact that reveals something about where European institutions are placing their attention – and their resources – as the climate of both planet and psyche becomes harder to ignore.
The Mad Scene as Structural Lens
Krauß's contribution, The Art of Mind, is described as a "new multimedia opera" that investigates "postmodern subjectivity and agency through the history of madness in the European context." The language is academic, but the form is visceral. According to ZKM's program notes, the work uses the operatic "mad scene" – that moment when a character's psychological coherence fractures – as a structural device for examining how "regimes of rationality, productivity, and normativity are shaped through modern psychiatry, media, and democratic capitalism."
The mad scene, historically, is where opera permits what it otherwise forbids: incoherence, excess, the refusal of narrative resolution. Krauß repurposes this form to ask what happens when the world itself seems to be unraveling. The auto-fictional character "Girl" travels through her own mind using a computer program, searching for the origin of voices that "both call and haunt her." Meanwhile, her mother – identified only as "MOW (Manic Old Woman)" – chooses to remain in a psychiatric ward rather than follow "a master plan prescribed by the unemployment office."
The detail about the unemployment office is not incidental. It locates the work precisely in the European present, where mental health, labor policy, and ecological anxiety are not separate crises but entangled conditions. The mad scene becomes, in Krauß's hands, "a vehicle for reimagining our relationship to madness and for articulating the emotional landscape of a world in crisis."
The Knot That Holds Existence Together
Sharafi's Sinthome operates in a different register but arrives at similar territory. The title references Jacques Lacan's concept of the sinthome – a "singular knot that holds existence together" when the usual symbolic structures fail. Sharafi also draws on the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva's work on relationality and entanglement, creating what the program describes as "a temporality in which past, present, and future remain interwoven."
The sonic materials are deliberately heterogeneous: microtonal structures, polymetric tensions, analog synthesizers, voice, live processing. "Folkloric traces and abstract noise textures coexist without hierarchy," the notes explain, "while acoustic and electronic materials continuously shift into one another."
What emerges is not a narrative but a condition – a way of being in time that refuses the linear progression that both capitalism and conventional concert programming assume. Sound becomes, in Sharafi's formulation, "a way of holding together heterogeneous times and affects – a knot through which fracture, memory, and persistence can be heard at once."
Space as Active Compositional Element
Both artists share something crucial: they treat the Klangdom not as a venue but as an instrument. The 43-speaker dome allows sound to move through three-dimensional space, surrounding listeners rather than projecting at them. This is not decoration. It is a compositional choice that changes what listening means.
When sound comes from everywhere, the usual hierarchy between performer and audience dissolves. There is no front. There is no stage to face. The listener becomes embedded in the work rather than positioned outside it. This has implications beyond aesthetics.
Consider what it means to experience ecological fragility not as information delivered from a podium but as an atmosphere that surrounds. The ECO/EXO cycle, as ZKM describes it, "transforms central areas of tension in the present into immersive sound spaces and combines ecological fragility with speculative, extraterrestrial perspectives." The ECO strand "gives voice to ecological crises through sound, focusing on atmospheres of vulnerability, resonances between body and environment, and listening as an act of responsibility."
Listening as an act of responsibility. That phrase deserves attention. It suggests that how attention is structured – where it comes from, what it surrounds, how it moves – is not neutral. The Klangdom's architecture makes this visible, or rather audible. It demonstrates that the container shapes the experience, that interfaces always have an ideology.
What Gets Naturalized
The TURNS ECO/EXO series, which runs throughout 2026, explicitly prioritizes "artists with no prior experience in the Klangdom" and grounds its curatorial approach in "feminist and decolonial" frameworks. This is not incidental programming. It is a deliberate intervention in who gets to use institutional resources and what questions those resources are used to ask.
The series has already featured artists like Mariana Carvalho and Merche Blasco, who, according to Reservix's event listing, "create new sound ecologies that transform eco-anxiety into collective spaces of sensory experience." The upcoming May installment, WOLVES AND THROATS, continues the cycle.
What's being naturalized here – what's becoming normal without being named – is a particular relationship between cultural institutions and crisis. ZKM is not simply presenting experimental music. It is positioning the museum as a site where ecological and psychological fragility can be processed collectively, through the body, in real time.
This matters for anyone thinking about how institutions respond to systemic stress. The policy conversation about climate tends toward data, targets, compliance frameworks. The governance conversation about mental health tends toward services, access, stigma reduction. Both are necessary. Neither captures what it feels like to live inside these conditions.
Cultural institutions like ZKM are doing something different. They are creating spaces where the phenomenology of crisis – what it actually feels like – can be shared and examined. This is not a substitute for policy. But it may be a necessary complement, a way of keeping the human sensorium visible in conversations that otherwise drift toward abstraction.
The Artifact Remembers
Tickets for SCREAMING VIBRATION are €7, with free admission for anyone under 27. The event runs from 7:00 to approximately 10:00 PM on April 30, 2026, in the Kubus at ZKM Karlsruhe.
The price point and age policy are worth noting. They suggest an institution that wants this work to reach people who are not already embedded in experimental music scenes – students, young professionals, the curious. The accessibility is part of the argument.
What remains after the sound fades is the question the evening poses: What does it mean to listen responsibly in a world that is, in various ways, screaming? The mad scene and the sinthome offer different answers, but both refuse the fantasy that coherence is available, that the fragments can be reassembled into a stable whole.
Perhaps that refusal is itself a form of honesty. And perhaps honesty, in this moment, is what cultural institutions owe.
For those tracking how European institutions are navigating the intersection of technology, ecology, and human experience, these questions won't stay confined to concert halls. On May 19 in Vienna, Human x AI Europe convenes precisely the room where such intersections become working problems – where policymakers, technologists, and cultural practitioners can examine what's being built, what's being naturalized, and what remains visible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is TURNS ECO/EXO: SCREAMING VIBRATION?
A: It is an immersive concert event at ZKM Karlsruhe on April 30, 2026, featuring experimental musicians L Twills and Rojin Sharafi performing in the Klangdom, a 43-speaker spatial sound dome. The event is part of ZKM's TURNS concert series exploring ecological fragility and speculative perspectives.
Q: Who curates the TURNS concert series at ZKM?
A: Dr. Lea Luka Sikau curates the TURNS series, which launched in 2025 and continues through 2026 with the ECO/EXO cycle focusing on ecological and extraterrestrial themes.
Q: What is the Klangdom at ZKM Karlsruhe?
A: The Klangdom is a hemispherical sound dome with 43 speakers that surrounds listeners with three-dimensional audio, allowing composers to use space as an active compositional element rather than simply projecting sound from a stage.
Q: How much do tickets cost for SCREAMING VIBRATION?
A: Tickets cost €7, with free admission for anyone younger than 27. Tickets are available at the ZKM Information Desk, box office, and through Reservix.
Q: What artistic approaches do L Twills and Rojin Sharafi use in this concert?
A: L Twills draws on operatic "mad scenes" to explore mental health and ecological fragility through multimedia opera, while Rojin Sharafi combines microtonal structures, analog synthesizers, and noise to create soundscapes informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and decolonial philosophy.
Q: What is the curatorial framework for TURNS ECO/EXO in 2026?
A: The 2026 cycle prioritizes artists without prior Klangdom experience and uses feminist and decolonial approaches as shared foundations for artistic research, transforming ecological and cosmic tensions into immersive sound experiences.