Matteo Milani: Christina, could you tell us about your background, and how you arrived, through your career, to conceive the “Electrical Walks” project?

Christina Kubisch: When people asks me what I am, what do I do, I always struggle to answer. I am an artist, a composer, I work with magnetic inductance, but I also write pieces for other musicians. I am a performer, I draw. It’s hard to define me. I was a flautist, I studied Composition with Franco Donatoni at the G.Verdi Conservatory of Milan, and also Electronic Music with Angelo Paccagnini . At the end of my studies at the Mila Conservatory, I started a much more personal and effective research, attending for 2 years night courses in Electronics. During these courses, I discovered a telephonic amplifier, a small cube, from which came curious sounds. This cube had inside some coils, and it amplified the magnetic sounds close by. Fascinated by this system, I had 50 special cubes built, and with them I created my first installations.

Sometimes at night I go through electronics catalogs and ask myself what I can change, subvert, using some components in an improper manner. Then I discovered headphones. I had them built in Bologna, after having projected them with an engineer. I still use them, only the internal components are different, but the exterior of the headphones is authentic, dates back to the first years of the 1980’s. Obviously, the listening is easier than with the cubes: it is more comfortable now to go around with wireless headphones. It is interesting to see how people move, some run around in the space, some go around slowly: the more people move around, the more interesting are the things they hear. Each movement of the head produces big changes in timber and amplitude to the sound people listens to through the headphones…” From Walking in the City with Christina Kubisch by Matteo Milani, Digicult.