Playfully blending a performance, conversation, and listening session, Rewire festival introduces 21 Ingredients, featuring artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian alongside researcher and writer Giada Dalla Bontà. Departing from the conversation Musicking Resistance in Rewire 2023, this performative talk dives into the complexities of “gharīb” – a notion of alternate world-ordering used by Arutiunian as a sonic and conceptual working method. It acts in dissonance with the prevailing understandings of time, rhythm, and attunement within western imaginaries. The word permeates Middle Eastern and Caucasian imaginaries by being closely linked to songs of resistance, illegal psychotropic substance trade, and music-making – activities that have consistently opposed established models of oppressive power and political organisation. Moving between scholarly explorations and prosaic practices, Dalla Bontà and Arutiunian discuss western, normative canons of tuning and notation systems, the phenomena of diaspora and cultural interrelations, as well as the role of the senses in creating what Hakim Bey called temporary autonomous zones.

Drawing from Armenian-Greek mystic and composer George Gurdjieff's analogy between cooking and making music, the duo reinterpret this syncretic logic by preparing his enigmatic “Salat” dish. As encapsulated in Gurdjieff’s assertion "When I eat, I self-remember,” the talk playfully underscores the connection between the concepts of nourishment, perception, and self-awareness. During the performance, a listening session interweaves with the soundscapes of a discussion and that of chopped vegetables, inviting the audience to partake in a sensory experience that bounces back and forth from history to the here and now of a kitchen, and concludes with a shared meal.

Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer exploring sonic dissent, aural cosmologies, and vernacular histories. His research experiments with speculative instruments, non-western knowledges, and alternate methods for world-ordering. Through playful investigation of hypnotic and enigmatic forms, his installations, films, and performances challenge the concepts of musical and political attunement. In 2022 Andrius Arutiunian represented Armenia at the 59th Venice Biennale with a solo show, titled Gharīb. Other recent solo shows include: Counterfates, Meduza Vilnius, 2023; Diaphonics, Centrala Birmingham, 2023; and Incantations, CTM Festival and silent green, Berlin, 2021.

Giada Dalla Bontà is a researcher, curator, and writer focusing on the intersection between sound, art, politics, underground and experimental practices, with a focus on unofficial cultures during the late Soviet Union and contemporary practices in Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics. She has worked with independent art projects and experimental music labels as well as institutions (Mondrian Foundation, HNI Rotterdam, Venice Biennale) and held lectures and participatory projects on sonic fictions and sonic agency in politics, art and ecology at Freie University Berlin, HKW and AdK, among others. Currently based in Berlin and Copenhagen, she is a PhD fellow affiliated with the Sound Studies Lab at Copenhagen University's Department of Arts and Cultural Studies.