Maria Komarova performing Krajïna during FIBER Festival 2024. Photo credit: Alex Heuvink

This year, FIBER Festival's theme was Outer/Body. In your words, how does “Krajïna” relate to this theme?

Something which fascinates me at the moment, not necessarily within this work, but, in general is the interconnection between us and technology and the internal influences between both.

For example, the adaptability of the body to technology and vice versa are very much interconnected. For me, it's very difficult to say "this is a natural environment" and "this is a technological environment" because technology also becomes an environment in itself. What fascinates me are the traces of technology which are left on our bodies and the traces which our bodies leave on technology.

I read on your website that many of the objects you found for this project were on the coast of Northern Portugal. How do you decide whether or not you can use something? What does the selection process look like?

This is very hard to say as this is very intuitive. Of course, the electronic parts are what I plan very well in order to be able to build things, especially taking into account that now, it's very hard to find things in physical shops.

So because the physical shops disappear together with their repair stores, it somehow becomes a very alienated field—a field of experts. And when I started working with electronics, I just ended up in some electronic store. I didn't have any knowledge, and now this shop is closed, so I imagined that if I would now decide to work with electronics, it would be maybe a bit more difficult. It's based on my curiosity but when I know that I need a certain type of material, I search for this

So you're imagining the sound first and thinking: "Oh, what could produce this?"

Well, in this project, I work with electret mic capsules. And it's a very basic mic, which you can build very easily. So, I was curious about how to work with this type of microphone, not only as a tool, but also as an object. So how to make this tool, which is commonly used for amplifying sound, not only as an output, but also as part of the process.

Beautifully put. When watching your performance, I felt that the timing of the music was very nonlinear. It didn't necessarily follow a certain scale, but there were many rhythms coming together in one. So how do you compose this?

I need to know very well what am I going to do and in which order, not only for the sake of sound, but also technically, because there is a lot of manipulation. And as soon as I adjust some objects in the performance, then sometimes it's more difficult to adjust it back, let's say.

Most of the time I know very well what I need to do, but sometimes things get out of control. So I actually need to practise quite a lot just in order to have a bit more control over the things which can sometimes misbehave.