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Etr’ange is a series of events hosting experiments in intermedia art and audio-visual performances.
Working across hybrid approaches to a range of media, be it sound, image, movement, word, or code - from musique concrète and abstract electronics to generative systems, algorithmic compositions, improvisation, and game mechanics, Etr’ange brings to pass an attempt at cutting through borders of genres and discourses, cultural codes, and identity policies, in a perceptual transmutation.
With a name coming from a play on French words étrange (strange), étranger (stranger), and être ange (being an angel), the project unravels such themes as estrangement and otherness, aiming to create situations for what François Laruelle calls “the conjuncture of the margin and alterity, dissemination and difference.” As he noted in Theory of Strangers, “Democracy is nothing but a transcendent ideal distributed between the two worlds: the ‘I’ and the ‘Stranger’.”
To bring attention to the Stranger, to the foreigner, is to bring attention to what threatens the world, to what escapes the world, to what moves through the world without worldly recognition. But how does this threat to the world by the Stranger manifest itself? It is simply through the strangeness of the stranger, the foreignness of the foreigner, and the victimhood of the victim as manifest within thought itself.
(“Laruelle. A stranger though”
Smith, Anthony P.)
The first iteration took place at Dock11, Berlin, on 28 March 2026, and featured four multidisciplinary performances by artists with diverse approaches, backgrounds, and origins.
Xristina Sarli invited the audience to encounter otherness through her multi-species playformance, which included live tardigrades, microscopy streaming, and game-based storytelling, evoking a vision of post-anthropocentric, symbiotic and co-creative relationships as a guiding principle for sustainable futures.
Fat brought Difference to the scene, working with it as a tension, existing within a socio-political realm. His audio-visual performance involved manipulation of sound and visual materials from the protests, and addressed the bandwidth throttling imposed by authoritarian governments on national internet connection as the protests progressed.
Logs proposed their vitalist solution as exile through “becoming-animal”. In their performance, they combine sophisticated electronics with immersive visual narrative and game design techniques. By creating a riveting, slowly evolving canvas generated through structures that mimic biological processes, they evoke an uncanny and complex transformative experience in the audience, questioning and shifting their perception of reality and identity.
Bankistan & Synthezia articulated estrangement through aesthetics of error, be it misfire, malfunction, or a stuttering incineration, toggling between spontaneity and stagnation within complex programmable environments, exploring visceral space in a technologically mediated multisensory experience through a multichannel immersive audio-visual setup.
Zero Night (Snezhana Reizen & Mike Iv) navigated the domain of alterity through the lens of speculative angelism*, understood as a heretical tool to introduce foreignness into the systems dominated by power struggles and capital. The presented performance, AngelNetz (meaning “fishing net” from German), unfolds through the pressure and stress, bringing into play magnetic fields, radio waves, electrical discharges, feedback and objects, and opening onto an anisotropic terrain of interrelations.
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*A “speculative angelism” referred here is neither a manifestation of the denial of the body nor a set of rules: for François Laruelle and Anthony Paul Smith, an angel is a Stranger who refuses to be defined by the world’s categories, be they biological, linguistic, or political. Speculative angelism presents a figure of the angel as a "rebel", a structural anomaly that exposes the world's laws as arbitrary and contingent.
