By VVSSL
Our team has been quietly building toward this for years. Through our shared curiosity, we have developed formats, installations, and sonic environments designed to make space and time both felt and audible, to make it more apparent by navigating the unseen.
VVSSL was founded in 2023, in a cultural landscape that had shifted considerably. The pandemic had interrupted the rhythms of public life. Funding for art and culture in Germany and across Europe had contracted. Geopolitical pressures were reshaping the conditions under which cultural organizations operate. For a team with nearly a decade of working together, the moment called for a new kind of structure.What was needed was a vehicle versatile enough to carry the programs and formats already developed, alongside the research, the theories, the concepts and collaborations we had only dreamed possible. A framework that could engage with artists beyond a single presentation, treating research and development as integral to the work rather than accessory to it, and exploring means of self-resourcing without depending entirely on funding systems that are increasingly in flux.Our work extends to artistic production, research, and the kind of shared direct experience that sound makes possible now, and in futures we can only begin to imagine.
VVSSL grew out of processes set in motion at the Berlin Institute for Sound and Music. As the ISM team’s work evolved through cultural productions, research partnerships, and collaborative initiatives, it became clear that a new kind of organisation was possible: one built around a more focused question, and a more direct relationship between research and shared public experience.
Nick Meehan, Joanna Petkiewicz, and Holger Stenschke founded VVSSL to pursue that question together. What they built is a research and development company focused on sound, designed for cultural presentation and production, and oriented entirely around shared direct experience.
Together with Benjamin Miller, Eckehard Güther, and Tobias Götz, whose mastery of spatial audio and sonic craft has shaped every VVSSL production, the team brings a rare depth of artistic, technical, and cultural expertise to every project.