My collaboration with Barbara Balba Weber emerged through conversations around sound, storytelling, materiality, and the social role of artistic practice. What immediately attracted me in her work was the way music operates as a human condition capable of creating encounters between people, memories, and generations.

Barbara's work with the Lotter Orchestra approaches music as a living and shared phenomenon. Through storytelling, performance, and the construction of meaningful musical objects, she develops spaces where children, adults, and older people can participate together. Rather than presenting folk traditions as fixed historical material, her practice treats them as living structures that continue to transform through experience and interaction.

A particularly significant aspect of her work lies in the transformation of objects and instruments. Existing objects are reshaped and given new roles, carrying stories, memories, and traces of previous lives. Instruments are as social and narrative bodies. Their histories, materials, and transformations become part of a larger process of communication.

This approach also questions the behavioral structures often embedded within conventional instruments. Musical instruments frequently carry expectations about technique, correctness, and legitimacy. Barbara's practice seeks to soften these boundaries and create situations where sound can be approached through curiosity rather than expertise. Noise, play, touch, and experimentation become valid forms of expression.
These ideas strongly resonated with my own practice and led to collaborations in which I was invited to contribute through the construction of musical objects and the development of participatory sonic environments. The relationship between sound, material, and interaction became a shared field of investigation.