Between 10-16 August, sound artist Mathias Guilbaud and visual artist Marina Oprea will be in Timișoara for an artistic residency as part of Urbanities, a new collaboration between SIMULTAN and SEMI SILENT.
Urbanities is a pilot residency programme built around dialogue between different artistic practices, with a particular focus on urban space. It approaches the city as a layered environment shaped by infrastructure, memory, communities, and different regimes of speed and visibility, looking critically at how these layers overlap — or remain absent from official representations of the city.
The residency brings together two artists from different disciplines and invites them to work with the urban environment as material for observation and experimentation. Through their respective sound and visual practices, they will explore the transformations shaping everyday life in Timișoara, while considering how space and time can be articulated through representations of the urban environment.
With a background in film studies, Mathias Guilbaud explores how sound can shift our attention and reshape our relationship with the spaces we move through. His practice combines documentary approaches, acousmatic composition and field recording, creating works in which living environments intertwine with personal histories. Cities are one of his main listening grounds. He is particularly interested in the sounds of construction, friction and urban change, and in what they can reveal about how spaces evolve, who shapes them and who gets to inhabit them.
Marina Oprea lives and works in Bucharest. Her projects begin with an interest in observing and deconstructing the ways identities take shape — whether those of people, places or objects — in relation to social structures, the art world and her own personal positions. Her practice is often collaborative and moves across performance, installation, video, ready-made and land art. More recently, her research has turned towards fossils, ruins and remnants of long-gone eras, alongside posthumanist theories and speculative scenarios concerning the very distant future.
In Timișoara, the two artists will work through field observation, recordings and exploratory walks through the city.
The final form of the collaboration has not been determined in advance. The process may lead to a sound piece, an installation, an intervention or an action in public space. Rather than prescribing a fixed outcome, Urbanities creates situations through different dialogue-based methods — an ongoing field of observation in which the artists’ practices can influence and reshape one another.
The outcome of the Timișoara residency will be presented in 2027 at SIMULTAN Festival and through the SEMI SILENT platform.
SEMI SILENT is a podcast platform dedicated to sound art, radio art and field recording, founded in Bucharest in 2016. Its early productions contributed to a sound ecology of the city through intimate urban memories that were explored, recorded, transformed and transmitted through sound. Over time, the platform has expanded towards works that move beyond documentary forms, using field recordings to create fiction, illusion and sonic dramaturgies.
The residency is part of the SIMULTAN 2026–2027 international co-production programme, developed together with local and international organisations working across media art, sound and technology.
Between May and November, artists with different practices are working in Timișoara through a series of residencies, developing projects that start from local contexts or previous research. Each collaboration opens a distinct working process, with results to be presented at SIMULTAN Festival 2027 before travelling through the partners’ network.
SIMULTAN Festival 21 — Against Resolution: Unfinished Thinking Undisciplined Art will take place in Timișoara from 24 to 27 September 2026, with extended collateral programmes until 4 October, at MX – Muzeul Corneliu Mikloși.
SIMULTAN 2026–2027 is funded by the Municipality of Timișoara through Centrul de Proiecte.
Partners: Werktank, IKLECTIK, Aksioma, obsolete studio, SEMI SILENT, Plan Zero, MUTEK, Fundația DALA, Ecluze pe Bega, Goethe-Institut, Institutul Francez, Ars Electronica, Austrian Cultural Forum, Colonia Pictorilor, The Secret Garden, Cărturești, Rezidența9.
With the support of: Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs.
Media partners: Revista Arta, Teletext, Scena9, RFI România, Revista Sunete, Zile și Nopți, Arhiva de sunet, Best of Timișoara, RRC, STPT