Artist in Residence Announcement

During my residency at LADA and the Goethe Institute London, I will learn more about translation, collective singing, community choirs and the relationship between breath, voice, sound and meaning.

The residency in London will offer an opportunity to reflect on and further develop my position as an artist, educator, and cultural worker while drawing inspiration from a new context. I hope to do this in dialogue with the community at Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and the wider local arts, educational, social and political scene. As an educator, I understand art as a collective way of thinking, a space where we can ask what concerns other artists, what possibilities exist for understanding art as a political, participatory, and social practice, and how we learn and unlearn from one another.

One strand of my research will focus on the texts of the writer Semra Ertan. Together with my mother, we published her poems in Germany. An English translation would bring her writings to a broader audience. I want to explore different forms of translating her texts not only from one language into another, but through voice, sound and collective practices. What happens to rhythm, sound, emotion and meaning as a poem moves between languages, voices and contexts?

I am particularly interested in the ritual of singing together as a form of community building. In my recent short film “Ein neues Wort / A New Word”, I follow a local choir of first-generation “guest workers,” from Turkey exploring collective memory, belonging, and shared voices. Extending this work, I co-organised an evening of performances by community choirs at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in June 2026. 

Alongside this, I will work with LADA’s Study Room and collection, exploring how archival materials can be read, translated, voiced and brought into conversation with the present. Through encounters, listening, breathing, singing and collective translation, the residency becomes a space to think about language, memory, migration and forms of shared knowledge.​ 

This research can form the foundation for new film and installation works that investigate how collective imagination can help us narrate and perhaps shape possible futures.

– Cana Bilir-Meier