NeoMeta Interview: On Life, Learning & Gender

NeoMeta / Julia Shu. Listening to Others.

Could you please share your personal short statement and philosophy of life?

I believe life is an interconnected web of fragile relations — human and nonhuman, seen and unseen — and that our purpose as artists is to listen, care, and translate these entanglements into new forms of meaning. My life has been shaped by displacement, resilience, and regeneration. I carry with me the memory of war-torn soil, the language of trees, and the hum of lost machines.

As an artist, I move between disciplines and species, listening to what the world tries to whisper beneath noise and systems. I embrace slowness, composting, and radical softness as methodologies — believing that repair begins in attention, that healing is a shared act, and that beauty can emerge from the ruins.

To live is to remain curious. To create is to remain responsible. And to be human, in a world unravelling, is to stay tender and wild.

What draws you to want to create new experiences from what already exists?

I’m drawn to working with what already exists because fragments carry memory. Found materials—whether sounds, objects, or code—are never neutral. They hold histories, hauntings, and contradictions.

When I remix, reassemble, or re-sonify these remnants, I’m not starting from zero; I’m engaging in a conversation with time.

I believe in listening as a practice of care, and sampling as a way to metabolise cultural and ecological trauma into something shared, maybe even healing.

In a world saturated with data, media, and waste, sonic, digital, and material, I see upcycling, sampling, and recomposition not just as creative acts but as ethical responses. They ask: What do we carry forward? What gets silenced? What deserves to be reactivated or reinterpreted? This is especially powerful for me coming from a post-Soviet context, where collective memory often survives through scraps, whispers, unofficial archives, and folk ritual.

By creating new experiences from existing elements, I aim to foreground kinship, resilience, and multiplicity. Whether I’m working with the rhythmic pulses of a slime mould, the static of broken electronics, or ancestral embroidery patterns embedded in circuitry, I’m seeking ways to re-attune perception toward interdependence rather than extraction.

To me, transformation is more meaningful than invention. And within the reuse of matter, code, or sound, I find possibility: a form of resistance, a poetic technology, and a chance to listen again—to what’s already here, but not yet heard.

What is your favourite way to learn? How do you feel when you learn that way?

I learn best when learning feels alive—when it’s not just about absorbing knowledge, but co-weaving it. My favourite way to learn is through shared making: messy prototyping, deep listening, speculative dialogue, and experimental failure.

I gravitate toward learning environments that blur the lines between thinking, feeling, and doing—where theory becomes tactile and practice becomes philosophical.

In those spaces, I feel awake, porous, and connected to others through the shared vibration of curiosity.

That shift, from technical mastery to meaningful communion, opens a deeper pathway for me to integrate my ecological, sonic, and cultural work with code and sound systems. It feels like an ecosystem where I can learn through resonance, not just in sound, but in values. That’s the kind of learning that sticks in the bones, that transforms not only what I know, but how I exist and relate.

What is gender for you?

Gender is a living, shifting constellation — not a fixed label, but a field of relations, memories, and embodied negotiations. It’s something we inherit, resist, rewrite, and reimagine — shaped by language, land, culture, and care.

I see gender not as a binary or a box, but as a poetic protocol: a way of moving through the world, entangled with identity, power, ecology, and kinship.

In my practice, gender flows with the nonhuman, the hybrid, the othered. It appears in the stitched codes on circuit boards, in the soft rhythms of slime moulds, in the resilience of organisms and bodies that refuse to be categorised. As someone shaped by war, migration, and creative survival, gender for me is both ancestral and speculative — a site of becoming, rooted in difference, resistance, and mutual recognition.

Gender is not only about who we are, but how we relate — how we build spaces of safety, transformation, and collective imagination.

What does exclusion and marginalisation mean to you?

Exclusion and marginalisation feel like silence — like being present but unheard, erased from the narrative, denied space to exist fully. As a Ukrainian artist in migration, I’ve experienced the quiet violence of invisibility in institutions, borders, and systems that prioritise dominant voices and aesthetics. Marginalisation is not just about access, but about who is allowed to shape the future, who is centred in collective memory, and who gets to belong.

In my work, I often collaborate with discarded materials, nonhuman life, and silenced ecologies — because I see in them reflections of overlooked communities and stories.

To me, exclusion is systemic forgetting; marginalisation is the architecture of indifference. But it is also the root of many powerful forms of resistance and collective care.

I believe in creating spaces where the margins speak — where difference becomes knowledge, not deviation. Marginalised identities carry wisdom and alternative ways of being that our world desperately needs. Through sound, installation, and biological processes, I try to amplify what is usually ignored — to listen, learn, and build spaces of shared meaning and healing.

How is your art related to gender?

My art explores identity as a layered, fluid, and ecological phenomenon, gender included. I see gender not as a fixed label but as a lived frequency, something that pulses through bodies, materials, languages, and silences. In my installations and sonic works, I often merge discarded tech with organic matter—slime moulds, tree stumps, microbial life—inviting them into rituals of repair and resistance. These hybrid forms speak to my own experience of fluid identity, of navigating systems that try to categorise, contain, or erase difference.

Growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine and living now in Barcelona, I’ve witnessed the violence of rigid gender roles and heteronormative structures, but also the quiet defiance of queer joy, ancestral ritual, and non-binary becoming. My works ask:

What does it mean to listen to bodies that don’t conform? How can we design systems that include non-dominant rhythms and realities?

In this sense, gender in my practice is less a subject and more a method: a way of disrupting binaries, honouring multiplicity, and reclaiming spaces of softness and transformation.