Eda Er composes works in which storytelling operates as structure rather than representation. Sound does not accompany a narrative from the outside; memory, rupture, gesture, repetition, and transformation determine how the work itself unfolds. Her performances often place the body inside a responsive system: extended voice, live electronics, movement, visual media, and material processes become interdependent, and the boundary between performer, instrument, and environment is deliberately unstable.
Central to this practice is a question: what might an instrument become if its technological logic were feminist?
Rather than treating technology as a neutral tool, Er approaches instrument-making as a cultural and political act. Who is allowed to compose? What is recognized as notation? Which forms of bodily and inherited knowledge enter the concert space, and which have been excluded from it? Her work draws on feminist new media studies, postcolonial inquiry, and embodied approaches to technology. Practices that have existed outside the dominant histories of Western concert music become generative structures for new instruments, scores, and forms of authorship.
Grief, diaspora, cultural memory, and generational silence recur throughout the work, not as themes but as compositional forces. Technology, in this practice, becomes an instrument of reclamation rather than erasure.
Across her work, storytelling is not representation but architecture — an active force that gives sound its shape.
