A flute doesn't have to sound like a flute. It can sound like a membrane tearing, like breath caught in a machine, like a balloon slowly yielding to pressure. Marina Cyrino, a Brazilian sound artist based in Berlin, has spent years proving this — attaching DIY preparations, objects, and balloons to her instrument, running it through hyper-amplification systems until the thing that emerges bears almost no resemblance to what you were taught a flute should be. She calls it a challenge to the "phallogocentric tradition" of flute playing and construction. The language is academic, but the practice is visceral: a radical re-embodiment of an instrument that Western classical music has spent centuries trying to make elegant, weightless, feminine in the most decorative sense of the word.

Cyrino's work sits inside a larger programme. RADAЯ: Experimental Session, curated by Sorora e.V. and hosted monthly at Bardo Projektraum on Jessnerstraße in Friedrichshain, has been running since at least late 2024, building a quiet but consistent space for FLINTA artists with migrant backgrounds working in sound and performance. The April 2026 session marks the series' continuation into its second year, a milestone that matters for a format this specific and this modestly scaled.

The curatorial framework is worth examining because it refuses the easy gesture. Berlin is saturated with events that claim to centre marginalised voices — the city's cultural funding apparatus practically demands it. But RADAЯ operates at a scale and with a consistency that suggests something less performative. Sessions have featured Karen Chalco, a sound improviser working with DIY electronic circuits and open-source programming tools, and Gubbi Ann alongside Cyrino, among other artists across what appears to be a regular monthly schedule through 2025 and into 2026. Each session follows the same format: intimate performance, then open conversation with the artist. Sliding-scale tickets, four to twelve euros. Doors at 19:30. The consistency of this structure is itself a statement — not every edition needs a new concept, a new angle, a new justification for existing. The space is the concept.

Bardo Projektraum is not a venue that announces itself. Tucked into a residential block near Frankfurter Tor, it operates as something between a gallery and a Projektraum in the truest Berlin sense — defined less by its architecture than by its programming. Recent exhibitions have included "Territorial Bodies," curated by Marcela Villanueva, which brought together artists exploring migration, memory, and embodied resistance. The venue's curatorial thread — diaspora experience, embodied politics, Latin American artistic networks — is consistent enough to read as a programme rather than a series of coincidences. It isn't trying to be the next KW Institute. It's trying to be a room where certain conversations can happen.

What happens at a RADAЯ session is deliberately hard to categorise. The series' own language cycles through ambient, noise, live coding, field recordings, voice, and "sonic rituals" — a grab bag that could describe half of Berlin's experimental music calendar. But the specificity lies in who is making the sounds and under what conditions. These are artists for whom migration is not a theme but a material fact, shaping not just what they create but how they access resources, audiences, and institutional support. Sorora e.V., the organising body, operates with support from Musikfonds e.V. and collaborations with organisations including Ardea and Karne Kunst — a patchwork of small institutional backing characteristic of Berlin's independent cultural ecosystem, resilient but perpetually precarious.

The April session's lineup has not been announced at the time of writing, which is itself typical of the series' rhythm — artists are often confirmed close to the date, suggesting a curatorial process that prioritises the right fit over the advance marketing cycle. Previous sessions offer a template: a darkened Projektraum, an audience of maybe thirty or forty, sound that moves between the composed and the contingent. An hour of focused listening followed by direct conversation with the artist, the format stripping away every buffer that larger venues place between performer and audience. There is no backstage. There is no green room. There is a person, their tools, and the sound they make in a room you are sitting in.

Cyrino's practice gains useful context when placed against the lineage of extended-technique flute literature — from Robert Dick's multiphonics manuals to Kaija Saariaho's spectral explorations. But her insistence on DIY fabrication and bodily attachment to the instrument places her closer to the tradition of instrument-building-as-composition that runs through Harry Partch and, more recently, Tarek Atoui. Where those figures rebuilt instruments to escape the tyranny of equal temperament or conventional interfaces, Cyrino rebuilds hers to escape the tyranny of what a flute is supposed to mean — its cultural coding as refined, as European, as polite. The hyper-amplification is not an effect; it is an act of exposure, making audible the breath, the body, the labour that classical performance has always worked to conceal. I should note that I'm working from descriptions and recordings here, not from the experience of sitting in that room — which is precisely the kind of encounter that resists documentation, that exists only in the shared air between performer and listener.

What makes RADAЯ worth paying attention to is not that it is unprecedented. Monthly experimental music series in Berlin Projekträume are almost a genre unto themselves — across Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg alone, at least a dozen recurring experimental sound series operate in comparable formats, many with some form of identity-based curatorial focus. The question is whether quantity dilutes meaning or whether the proliferation of these micro-spaces represents something genuinely structural: a distributed infrastructure for artistic practice that the city's larger institutions cannot or will not provide. RADAЯ's answer, multiple sessions deep and entering a second year, is that the infrastructure is the practice. The series does not exist to launch artists into larger circuits, though it may. It exists to make a room available, on a regular schedule, for sounds that most programming structures would not accommodate.

Berlin's experimental music ecology has always depended on spaces like this — temporary, underfunded, sustained by commitment rather than capital. The difference with RADAЯ is the specificity of its focus. By centring FLINTA artists with migrant backgrounds, it creates a context where diaspora experience and sonic experimentation are not parallel tracks but the same track. The sound is shaped by displacement. The displacement is articulated through sound. This is the operating logic of artists like Cyrino, whose entire practice is about taking an inherited form — the Western concert flute — and forcing it to speak in a language it was not designed for. That the conversation afterwards is as central as the performance itself suggests a series that understands its own stakes: the work is not finished when the sound stops.