Progetto Positano 2026

This year, Zeynep Toraman and Bertram Wee are the two scholarship holders of the Progetto Positano. They each will spend four weeks in Positano on the Kempff Foundation’s estate. On November 24, 2026, ensemble mosaik will present works by the two scholarship holders in a concert at the silent green in Berlin.

Zeynep Toraman (born 1992) is a composer and scholar from Istanbul, Turkey, who lives and works in Berlin. Her practice-based research explores the ways in which texts (in the broadest sense) can interact within the larger framework of musical compositions. She considers her own library an archive and uses it as a starting point for her research. Her works are inspired by autobiographies, poetic, historical and fictional texts. Her past and current artistic partners include Lauren Cauley, ELISION Ensemble, Ensemble Linea, Quatuor Diotima, Distractfold Ensemble, Ensemble Adapter, Amie Weiss and Nicola Barbieri, Noam Bierstone and the Wet Ink Ensemble.

Her music has been performed at festivals such as the Darmstadt Summer Courses (Darmstadt, Germany), the Summer Academy Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany), IRCAM ManiFeste (Paris, France) and Wet Ink Large Ensemble Readings (New York, USA). Her research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Toraman was also a senior lecturer at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. In 2023, she completed her PhD in composition with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Further information about Zeynep Toraman can be found here.

Singapore-based composer and keyboardist Bertram Wee writes music that focuses on being. His compositions deal with concepts such as presence, friction, materiality and excess. He regards the body as a place of mediation and strives for music that is deeply rooted in physical experience. He describes his compositional work as ‘grainy’ and ‘unstable’ with an enthusiasm for instinctively experiential, physically perceptible sounds. His goal is to bring the relationship between physical action and sound production to the fore.
In addition to writing his own works, he is also active as a performer of contemporary music and plays with his partner Lynette Yeo as ‘b-l duo’. The two specialise in music for keyboards and are free of aesthetic prejudices and open to a wide variety of styles. Together with like-minded colleagues, Bertram Wee founded ‘weird aftertaste’, a Singapore-based collective for new music dedicated to exploring the boundaries of musical expression.

Bertram Wee studied at the Royal College of Music in London and has been invited to the Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency and the Goethe-Institut Residency in Singapore, among others. His works have been performed at festivals such as Wien Modern, hcmf//, Ultraschall Berlin, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Maerzmusik Berlin, AngelicA Bologna, Musik 21 Niedersachsen, BBC Proms, Thailand International Composers Festival, Asian Composers League Festival and Singapore International Festival of Arts.

Further information can be found here.