Manja Ristić traces the textures of belonging embedded within the body, where ancestral memory, epigenetic inheritance, and lived experience accumulate in fragile yet resilient layers, shaping a poetics of sound and sensation. Drawing on imagined scores and gestures, tracing sulphurous rivers, activating abandoned industrial spaces, and listening to the dense resonance of ancient forests. The piece positions the body as both instrument and archive, where tremor, echo, and silence become forms of language. Personal and collective histories intertwine, invoking the lingering presence of past generations, including the labor and displacement of post–World War II Yugoslavia, to suggest that memory persists as a kind of sonic sediment carried through time. Blurring boundaries between field recording, performance, and narrative, Ristić creates an immersive listening space where environmental sound, embodied perception, and ancestral traces converge into a quiet yet insistent meditation on continuity, loss, and remembrance.
1 — thick green bed of a land
2 — bore its wounds in silence
~
Textures of belonging, relentlessly woven into the epigenetics, layer upon layer, building palimpsests of human existence that are both fragile and resilient, with nothing but a wobbly strand of DNA. The way our grandparents' experiences spill across our systems, the way their grandparents’ experiences formed them in the first place, like a busy cityscape humming in the background, keeping the flow, making things operate, and despite their physical peril, hearts still flicker and divulge poetry in aqueous vellums.
(Voice of my grandmother) That heartthrob you caused is nothing but a retaliation.
Score: Find Sulphurous River — its sound tension, its flow melodic.
Ancient forest holds the space densely, through the pockets of morphological holos, it sputters resonance from its shallow bellies.
Score: Rub your palms inside the abandoned and toxic industrial cistern.
Texture of memories surging, saturated, rugous membrane, the uterus. Moments that escaped oblivion and became family stories, then carved in, until crystallized, until shimmering, until exhibited.
Score: Everything that was once Earth still roams. Can’t you feel the weight of it?
Between these textures, there and everywhere, these murmurs, cellular glitches open like an uninvited threshold. The body becomes an instrument, the sound becomes the language: the tremor, the echo, the fear or devotion, the quiet refusal. We lean our hearts toward ancestral static, its emotional sediment, yearning in stillness to sense the flow of these secret rivers. And as the past rises in its glory and resonance, the poem is born, waking up the burgeons once pressed into the tissue.
~
In the dead of night, she wandered through the mountain forest, far from home, where the shadows danced, and lights shimmered like whispers in the depths of the trees. She stumbled through the spiral, away from the trenches dug day after day, with comrades beside her, building railways to nowhere.
They couldn’t have known, those who toiled in the dust, that no trains would ever pass. Forgotten by time, the tracks were broken, sold, discarded.
Yet the forest, it remembered, her light steps and the luminous tears mothering the crevices of night. She found solace on the thick green bed of a land that bore its wounds in silence.
~
For my grandma Negosava Ristić, born Stefanović, and the youth of post—WW2 Yugoslavia, who built the country with their bare hands.
Releases May 1, 2026
All sounds recorded, played, composed, and edited by Manja Ristić
Mastering Kory Reeder
Cover image & text by Manja Ristić
Sculpture in the image by Adriana Popović
Field recording locations: Italy (Gagliole, Province of Macerata), Portugal (Lisbon, Barreiro, Nazare), Croatia (South Adriatic—islands of Vrnik, Mljet, Korčula), Austria (Upper Austria—European Green Belt). Hydrophone recording locations: Italy (mineral springs of Esino River), Austria (Schwartze Aist River), Portugal (Tagus River), Croatia (littoral belt around islands of Vrnik, Mljet, Korčula). Instruments used: cello, violin, EMS Synthi 100 (Radio Belgrade Electronic Studio), piano which belonged to Karl Katzinger aka John Tylo (Garage Drushba Harrachstal near Freistadt). Soundwalk through the village of Gagliole—participants: Munia di Domenico, Hélène Marseille, Lionel and Juliette Malric.
Executive Producer, Kory Reeder
Sawyer Editions, 2026
SES034
Sawyer Editions, 2026
SES034