Sonic Fragments and Overheard Realities | Inside Out: A Conversation with Đurđija Vučinić
- ELSEHERE
- 7 days ago
- 7 min read
Đurđija Vučinić, a multidisciplinary sound artist and filmmaker, treats listening not as a passive reception, but as an active, ethical alignment with the world. Rooted in an early awareness of mediated sound and political radio transmission during the collapse of Yugoslavia, her practice captures the political and emotional architectures carried by field recordings, overheard voices, and long-take moving images. In this edited text-based conversation, Đurđija Vučinić traces the trajectories of her sonic landscapes, revealing how sound fractures, repeats, and exposes the hidden hierarchies of collective attention.
ELSEHERE: Before you had a name for what you were doing, was there an earlier way you understood yourself in relation to the world through listening?
Đurđija Vučinić: I'm not sure I still have a name for what I'm doing. In a way, I panic slightly when I hear that question because it suggests a clearer origin story than I actually have.
Once I started recording soundscapes, I began hearing the world differently. A voice, a passing sentence, a car alarm that has been going for so long you no longer register it. Then it stops, and the first sound behind it suddenly feels magnified. I found a lot of joy in moments like that.
One person who stayed with me was a preacher on the E train. The first time I heard her, I was stopped by a simple melody she kept singing and later made a short piece from it. Then, completely by chance, I encountered her again. This time I recorded her preaching. The train was getting louder and so was she. Listening back, I became interested in the musical movement of her voice, the way it rose and pushed against the noise around it as her preaching built toward a climax. I started composing around it, editing it, treating her like a protagonist and her preaching like an aria.
Looking back, I think I was becoming aware of how much sound can carry: stories, tension, atmosphere, character. Things that often go unnoticed until you stop and listen.
ELSEHERE: Your background in radio feels foundational to your practice. Looking back, was there an early experience of transmission, voice, atmosphere, or mediated sound that quietly shaped how you now work?
Đurđija Vučinić: Radio was already present in my life long before I worked in it. I grew up during the final years of Yugoslavia and the period when the country was falling apart, and during the Milošević years. Radio was constantly on in our home. One station in particular was important because it was one of the few places where people could find out what was actually happening. All other media was state controlled. There were protests, demonstrations, and events that weren't being reported accurately elsewhere, and this station was openly against the regime, which made it hard to broadcast and hard to reach. Everyone seemed to have their own theory about how to get a better signal. We had a designated spot in our apartment where reception was best. Others moved antennas around, and there were even stories about putting potatoes on them. But when we visited my grandma and other relatives, there was only static. They couldn't tune in at all.
ELSEHERE: In Unread, why did this work need to take the form it did, where the ocean remains outside the frame, while sound, subtitle, repetition, and refusal carry the emotional structure?
Đurđija Vučinić: I've always been drawn to long takes. Shots where someone leaves the room and the camera stays. The train that hasn't arrived yet. Moments that ask you to stay where you are instead of rushing toward what's next. If you stay with something long enough, it starts becoming something else. Paul Schrader wrote something about the long take being about being there rather than getting there. I've always felt that.
Then one afternoon my mother sat down and started putting the shoelaces back into my Converse. She had washed them. We don't live in the same country. We had met somewhere in the middle, I came from New York, she and my brother from Belgrade. A little over a week together. And there she was, doing that.
I left the camera running for over twenty minutes. She finished with the laces and then just sat and looked out. I know that look.
When I watched the footage back in New York I felt sad. The ocean stays outside the frame because what mattered was never the view. It was her face and what I already knew was behind it.
ELSEHERE: Listening is often treated as passive, but your work suggests otherwise. What kind of ethical or relational act is listening for you now?
Đurđija Vučinić: When I first moved to New York I spent a lot of time listening to strangers. Cab drivers, bus drivers, people on trains. I was simply there, without headphones. At some point I started recording.
People would tell me things. Stories about religion, family, work, rage, gratitude, loneliness. Sometimes we spoke for over twenty minutes and never saw each other again. What stayed with me wasn't only what was said but the rhythm of the speech, certain phrases, the way a person carried a story. Some words still exist in my head in the voices that spoke them. One driver started talking about Allah, then turned to me and said, "She doesn't believe. Unbelievable."
I was drawn in even when I didn't understand everything. Once I was in a restaurant kitchen where Turkish, Spanish, English, football commentary, and the call announcing sundown during Ramadan were all happening at the same time. I didn't speak Turkish but I couldn't look away. The atmosphere, the rhythm, the emotion, the feeling that something meaningful was happening.
I did feel a responsibility toward those voices. When I used them in my work I didn't want to ruin what had drawn me to them in the first place. Not just the information they carried, but the person. The rhythm of their speech, their humor, their contradictions, the things that made them specific. The longer I listened, the harder it became to reduce people to a single story.
ELSEHERE: Across acousmatic composition, sound-based video, and music for moving image, what is the question, pressure, or condition that most consistently organizes your practice?
Đurđija Vučinić: My piano professor used to tell me, "Đurđija, you always fall in love with the countersubject." We were working on Bach. I would start with the main theme and then slowly begin bringing out the countersubject instead. She kept pointing it out, not to correct me, but as if she recognized something.
The way you hear something affects what emerges from it. In a fugue several voices unfold at once. The notes are all there on the page but what you hear depends partly on what you're listening for.
I think about the woman I recorded preaching on the E train. Everyone around her was trying to get somewhere. She was the only one who wasn't.
ELSEHERE: Is there something from that earlier period that still operates in your work now, not as subject matter, but as rhythm, delay, interruption, or a way of structuring attention?
Đurđija Vučinić: What interested me wasn't only reaching a particular station. It was everything in between. You turn the dial and suddenly land on a preacher, a salsa station, a conversation in a language you don't understand, a fragment of news, a commercial, a voice that stays with you.
I'm interested in how completely different realities can exist at the same time. Attention moves between them. Sometimes what stays with me isn't a single voice but the fact that they were all there together.
ELSEHERE: You often work with field recordings, overheard voices, fragments of speech, repeated phrases, and originally composed music. What kinds of meaning become possible for you only when sound and language begin to fracture, repeat, or fail to fully arrive?
Đurđija Vučinić: In Johnny Cage I was recording a speakerphone call about a health insurance denial. The call has that specific quality of waiting: hold music, procedural language, the moment before you find out. Around the same time I was scanning FM radio and landed on a broadcaster losing his mind because Taylor Swift had announced an album. The Empire State Building turned orange to commemorate it. I couldn't believe that level of collective attention while a genocide was unfolding in Gaza. What interested me wasn't only the contrast between those things, but the hierarchy of attention they revealed.
The preacher I recorded was also trying to reach someone. “Can I see hands? Is anyone there?” That's a transmission that may or may not arrive. The piano melody is the only thing in the piece that stays steady. Everything else is fragments, interruptions, things suspended or denied. The melody keeps returning, slow and unresolved. It doesn't explain anything. It just remains.
About Đurđija Vučinić
Đurđija Vučinić is a composer and musicologist based in New York City. Her practice moves between experimental electroacoustic composition, sound-based video, and music for moving image. She holds an MA in Musicology from the University of Arts in Belgrade and worked as a music editor at RTS Radio Belgrade's Third Programme, where she edited programs spanning early music, historical recordings, contemporary composition, jazz, and late-night music broadcasts. She has written music criticism covering contemporary classical and orchestral music for Berkshire Fine Arts and other publications. Her work has been presented across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
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Artist Statement
My work is built around listening. Who gets heard, what gets drowned out, and what the signal is carrying instead. Working across experimental composition, sound-based video, and music for moving image, I am drawn to fragments, overheard voices, radio transmissions, field recordings, and originally composed music. I'm interested in how completely different realities can occupy the same space at the same time, and in what begins to emerge when attention moves between them.
Listening, for me, is not passive reception but a way of structuring attention. The voice you follow shapes everything else. What emerges depends partly on what you're listening for.
About Inside Out
Inside Out is ELSEHERE’s long-form conversation series, published through STRATUM. It begins from the belief that before artists are understood through category, institution, or medium, they must also be encountered through the deeper structures that shape a practice over time: memory, method, contradiction, relation, and the conditions of life pressing from within the work. This conversation with Đurđija Vučinić has been edited from her written responses for publication.
Edited By Yuyang Hu
