Anya Yermakova will be the next Orpheus fellow researcher dealing with Futures in Artistic Research
When we launched the call for the Futures in Artistic Research Fellowship, the ambition was clear: not simply to host a researcher continuing their existing personal portfolio, but to appoint a catalyst capable of genuinely impacting the future of artistic research in music. In Anya Yermakova, the institute has found an artist-philosopher whose inquiry promises to redefine the epistemological and methodological boundaries of the discipline.
Beyond Metrical Boundaries: Relational Logic and Sonic Epistemology
Yermakova’s work operates at a transformative intersection of sound, history of science, and critical media practice. Holding a PhD from Harvard University, her research explores proto-rhythmic and microrhythmic musical worlds as entry points into logical pluralism. By positioning rhythmic errantry as a gateway towards embodied, relational, and dynamic logicality, her practice introduces the pluralism of formal logics – challenging the assumed hegemony of binary formal logic – into musical thought. Anya Yermakova conceives her compositional practice as sculpting sound and her performance research as engaging coastal, conceptual, and somatic interfaces, resituating musical composition from a purely formal craft into a profound instrument of critical inquiry.
Reflecting on her appointment, Yermakova remarks:
Excited to embark on rigorous interplay between the intellectual questions and the creative practice, the synthesis championed by Orpheus Instituut
Ecological Entanglements: Embodied Breath and the Noisy Non-Self
Her upcoming project at Orpheus Instituut directly tackles a major overlooked nexus in contemporary electroacoustic music: combining field recordings with acoustic instrumental performance without metric normalisation of ecological sounds. Through interconnected concepts of breath and rhythm, Yermakova re-interrogates the boundary between human and non-human agency.
Drawing on Mariusz Kozak’s understanding of breath as noise enacting musical time, alongside Mark Peter Wright’s concept of the "Noisy Non-Self", the research reintroduces the performer's embodied presence into field-recording practices that traditionally erase traces of the recording body. By bringing aerial and hydrophone recordings into dialogue with piano, accordion, and flamenco footwork, field recordings and instrumental practice inhabit a shared liminal space in which breath and emerging rhythms become core compositional principles.
Supported previously by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Adrian Piper Foundation, ACLS, the Rhodes Scholarship, and the Ocean Memory Project, Yermakova brings an extraordinary breadth of cross-disciplinary rigour to Ghent. Her fellowship will not only yield a new musical work and critical paper, but will actively reshape how artistic research conceptualises agency, temporality, and ecological relation.