“Fuga” is a performative sound installation by Netta Weiser that brings new life to a collection of recordings from the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. Centered on sounds captured in the 1930s in Egypt’s Siwa Oasis by Jewish-German composer and musicologist Birgitte Schiffer (1909–1986), the work activates histories shaped by displacement—tracing Schiffer’s exile and Weiser’s own trajectory of migration—while engaging the social and cultural realities embedded in recorded voices from the desert city. 

Through sound, performance, and spatial composition, Weiser approaches these recordings as living traces, using a queer-diasporic lens to amplify silenced narratives. Developed for the Hörraum at the Humboldt Forum, the installation immerses audiences in a field of circulating voices and textures, creating shifting constellations of listening.

In “Fuga,” the archive becomes a space of encounter, where layered histories, memory, and movement resonate anew.