Feature: Danya Pilchen – Necessary Nomadism

Danya Pilchen (UA) is a composer based in Den Haag and a graduate of that city’s Royal Conservatoire. He explores the human experience of time through sound and his work delves into the idea of ‘collective experiences’ of time, challenging the individuality of our perception and creating shared, immersive moments. During the spring of 2025, alongside the musician Gregor Connelly he hosted the Rotterdam premiere of the installation, Ample Space Between, at WORM’s S/ash Gallery. Pilchen is a European artist pur sang, working in a number of lands, and his latest residency at Schafhof in upper Bavaria, which came about in part thanks to a collaboration with WORM. An eloquent and energetic individual, Danya explains his practise and what’s in store for Bavaria (another Freising resident, Giulia Zabarella will come to WORM in Autumn, 2026).

Danya, Tell us about yourself.

DP: I am a composer, sound artist, and pianist based in The Hague. In my practice, especially as it pertains to sound installations like the one I presented at WORM, or the one I’m creating during my residency at Schafhof, I focus on the perception of space through listening, and how it affects the listener’s internal experience of time. Many times, that also means creating works that are tailored to a specific space, using spatialised sound and acoustic feedback to highlight the room’s frequency response. That is, for example, ‘Ample Space Between’ (created at Trixie, The Hague, later shown at WORM) and ‘Paper Braids‘ (premiered and recorded at The Orgelpark, released on Moving Furniture Records), or my new piece for voice, two pianos and two organs that will be premiered on September 26 at the Orgelpark.

At other times, I create works that are more flexible, and rather than being tied to a particular room, I create listening practices that guide the musicians and listeners to engage with the space in their own way. That’s what happens in my piece, ‘Two Songs. Anne, Germaine, Koen, Seamus, Danya’ (released on Edition Wandelweiser Records) or EVIL GAZE. In some way, this is also what I am doing in the work I am creating at Schafhof.

So: how does Danya Pilchen find himself in Germany?

DP: I’ve had a connection with Germany for a while. In 2021, I participated for the first time in the Klangraum ‘day by day’ festival in Düsseldorf. This yearly festival is organised by a Düsseldorf-based Dutch composer, Antoine Beuger, who also runs Edition Wandelweiser (a score publisher), and the Edition Wandelweiser Records label. His work and the festival’s collectivist ethos had a huge impact on my development. Then, in 2022, we went to Düsseldorf again with the brilliant Kali Ensemble, who I had begun to with the preceding autumn. We gave a concert at the Robert Schumann Hochschule at the invitation of Professor Oliver Schneller, featuring music by me, mutual composer friends from The Hague, and the composition students from Düsseldorf.

After that, in 2024, a fantastic artist duo, Christoph Nicolaus and Rasha Ragab, invited me to present my participatory installation ‘Songs of Song of Songs’ in their series ‘Klang im Dach’ in Munich. It was then that I first met Eike Berg, the director of Schafhof. He invited me to visit the exhibition and residency space, which left a huge impression on me. He invited me to stay in residency in the future, but that would mean finding a partner institution in the Netherlands, which eventually turned out to be WORM, and I am very grateful that they facilitated this opportunity for me and also opened the door for many future Netherlands-based artists to come and stay at Freising.

Your practice is often based around ideas of space and how what your create reacts to space. How does, say making something for a record release, an installation in Slash Gallery in WORM or what you are now doing at Schafhof Kunstforum demand a different response?

DP: To me, it is essentially the question of accepting that there are different levels of control over the listening space and how I can create different impressions of space regardless of how much control I have. For example, at WORM, I had absolute control, where (musician) Gregor (Connelly) and I could analyse the frequency response of the Slash Gallery space from multiple points and then use those frequencies to tune the installation objects to resonate with the space.  We were in the inner gallery space, away from the street, where the gallery’s main door leading to the toilet and exit area was closed. The other door that we used for entering the installation was deeper inside, so the space where the installation was felt acoustically ‘separated’ enough to have very few interventions from outside.

For a CD release, on the other hand, I have absolutely no control over the experience of whoever chooses to listen to it. Therefore, I question how it can work – whether someone wants to listen on headphones or speakers, sitting down in a quiet room, or while commuting. I can’t tell anyone how to listen to my record, so I would rather imagine how the space of the recording can interact with the space around the listener at any given moment.

The work I am creating right now at Schafhof is, in a way, very similar. I have a wonderful studio where I can experiment, and I can show intermediate results of what I do during open studio visits, but the work eventually will be exhibited in one of the museum spaces where I can’t work at the moment, so I need to think about how the work can travel without me. My current idea is to replace the static presentation similar to what I did at WORM with a more dynamic one, where each microphone is connected to a motor that constantly shifts it up and down, allowing it to change its distance to the speaker and thus travel through different room modes available at a particular point. Ideally, that kind of installation could work autonomously in any space. But I still have a lot of technical kinks to iron out!

I presume your work also demands quite a bit of nomadism, and if so how does your work stay with you, or develop, given the demands and constraints of travel?

DP: The idea of having the installation work without me (being there), or be more ‘plug-and-play’, comes precisely from this “necessary nomadism”, and it is a constant struggle for me to keep my work site-specific, and to be able to engage with space around it while staying mobile. The idea to use motors comes exactly from this line of thinking, but it also comes from the physical constraints of travelling between Rotterdam and Freising.

For example, I literally wouldn’t have been able to afford transporting the objects of my previous installation along such a distance; so working with smaller components was a natural development. In the same way, I am planning to use Schafhof’s wood workshop to make wooden frames for my prototype, as I am not able to bring the metal stands that Dennis Slootweg produced for my previous one. So all these choices come in a way from the constraints imposed by travel, and in another way, they push my thinking towards avenues I might not have discovered otherwise.