ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Friday, September 18th at 8pm, ISSUE presents the first commission from 2026 AIR Eden Girma. In this new work for voice and electronics, Girma explores the fraught and ever-shifting nature of being, as colored by loss, language, and belonging. Part dreamscape and part summoning circle, an intimate diasporic familial archive is pieced together through the eyes of a five-year-old child. Improvisation with spoken word and song, digital instruments, live processing, and mixed media, opens a space in which to grapple against both tensions and resonances laced within narratives around migration, cultural preservation, embodied history, and identity making.
Girma’s residency is supported by Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program (TIP) and is part of an ongoing program collaboration between two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.
Eden Girma is a multi-instrumental musician, vocalist, producer, and composer hailing from Madison, WI. Having grown up at the nexus of widely varying and vibrant musical traditions, Eden creates through a variety of audio-visual-technological media — bridging realms such as popular music, improvisatory collaboration, expressionism, and experimental electronics. Through a genre-bending compositional ear and a poetic lyricism, Girma aspires to create art that not only resonates with individual hearts, but brings people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy. They employ practices of improvisation, playfulness with time, lush harmonic movement and polyphonic dissonance, alongside technologies of interactive and generative music, to wield songs and soundscapes as healing interruptions of daily life, imaginative excavations of marginalized histories, and uplifting counterpoints to isolating, disconnecting societal scripts.
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