About the program
In advance of her December 6 performance at the Graham Foundation, Eve Aboulkheir offers an in-depth artist talk at the Lampo Annex on December 4, exploring the ideas, fieldwork, and processes behind Medea(s) – Tskaltubo. She reflects on her time inside the abandoned Medea sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia, and discusses how the building’s shifting acoustics and states of decay informed the work. Aboulkheir shares photographs and field recordings made on site, then reveals how she modifies those sounds in the studio. For her, it’s change—not documentation—that conveys the presence of a place. The acoustics of architecture become the architectures of memory.
Medea(s) – Tskaltubo is Eve Aboulkheir’s speculative sonic study of the Medea sanatorium, completed in 1962, in Tskaltubo, a spa town in Georgia that was abandoned after the Soviet collapse. For Aboulkheir, Medea is a place of ambiguity: monumental architecture gradually overtaken by nature, suspended between care and neglect. Even its name resonates, recalling the ambivalence of the mythic Medea—between healing and poison, order and drift—that mirrors the building’s condition today. Her new work draws on recordings she made inside the vacant building, later transformed on a modular synthesizer, together with ARP 2500 sounds recorded during a residency at INA GRM in Paris. For the performance at the Graham Foundation—which marks her debut in the United States—Aboulkheir arranges these materials into open structures, using spatialization, reverb, and filtering to shape them in real time.
Founded on bubbling hot springs, Tskaltubo once welcomed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens on state-prescribed holidays every year. Workers arrived with government-issued vouchers for rest and treatment, while members of the political elite came to enjoy the same mineral waters. Among its many sanatoriums was Medea, an imposing classical structure whose colonnades and blue archways embodied the ideals of health and prosperity. After the Soviet collapse, the complex was abandoned and later became a refuge for people displaced by the war in Abkhazia, leaving it caught between grandeur and ruin.
Reflecting on her visit to Tskaltubo in April 2025, Aboulkheir noted, “I approached Medea as a succession of listening points. The distant croaking of frogs, heard from inside, overlapped with the creaking of doors… the same frogs, heard up close by the pond, now mingled with air currents through the colonnades and the slamming of doors on the upper floors.” For the French composer, Medea is a place of ambiguity: monumental architecture gradually overtaken by nature, suspended between care and neglect. Even its name resonates, recalling the ambivalence of the mythic Medea—between healing and poison, order and drift—that mirrors the building’s condition today.
Aboulkheir performs on December 6 at the Graham Foundation in conjunction with the exhibition Fragmented Manifestos, part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which brings together episodes from recent architectural history as open references—unfinished, plural, and interpretive—and reflects how creative practices reinvent themselves in times of radical change.
Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization’s core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.
Additional support provided by Villa Albertine Chicago, the French Institute for Culture and Education.
