Matija Schellander
(c) Peter Gannushkin
Matija Schellander (born 1981 in Ludmannsdorf-Bilčovs, Austria) studied double bass at the Conservatory of the City of Vienna and completed the course for computer music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His influences are manifold and range from Musique Concrete to Hip-Hop, Techno, Improv, Jazz, New Music, Early Music, Traditional and Film Music. He works with instruments as well as field recordings, in the studio and on stage. Timbre, sampling, and a moving, organic sound image are central to sound as an independent artistic and narrative element.
He lives and works as a composer, double bass player and electronic musician in Vienna and composes for music ensembles, theatre, contemporary dance and film. Together with Maja Osojnik, he is part of the electro-acoustic duo Rdeča Raketa, works regularly with the Italian sound artist Attila Faravelli and runs the trio Foreign Correspondents with Ryu Hankil from Seoul (electronic instruments, typewriter) and Noid (cello) from Vienna. His work and tours have taken him throughout Europe, North America and Asia. He has worked for many years with the theatre directors Ivna Zic and Franz-Xaver Mayr, including at the Theater Ulm, the Winkelwiese, the Roxy Birsfelden and the Schauspielhaus Wien, the Theater Basel and the Schauspielhaus Graz.
The radio play ‘Wendy Pferd Tod Mexiko’ (first broadcast Ö1, January 2018) with the author Natascha Gangl and the musician Maja Osojnik received the prize for the best long radio play at the Berlin Radio Play Festival 2018.
Music for “Gebrochenes Licht / قوس قزح”
2019, 25’
“Qaus quzah”, which means rainbow as well as iris in Arabic, describes the physical process of refracting light, its shattering, so to speak. Syrian author Lubna Abou Kheir, newly residing in Zurich, thinks in Arabic and writes in German. She tells the story about our global village, in which distances are sometimes in danger, sometimes easily surmountable by a mouse click. Instead of light, it is connections that shatter. They open up – through refuge or through WhatsApp, through transmigration of souls or through Google Maps – and they disappear, while connecting colors between life and death. A recruit and a broken phone, which is still dialing a number. A woman in Zurich, whose connections to the world, but also to the chat with her mother in Istanbul’s exile, are becoming tedious. A Swiss child, with a mission from another world which is breaking into their childhood bedroom. And a taxi driver – whose GPS is steering from Zurich to Damascus – who realizes that with four wheels, he can change the face of the world.
Director Ivna Žic, who herself is a crossover artist between writing and staging, has a lucid instinct for text and an obsession with language (s) and the rooms that open up between them.
director: Ivna Žic
text: Lubna Abou Kheir
concept: Lubna Abou Kheir, Ivna Žic, Julia Reichert
stage and costume: Sophie Reble
music: Matija Schellander
translation consulting: Garda Elsherif
dramaturgy: Julia Reichert