Michael von der Nahmer

SonaME – Sonification of Mental Experience explores how inner states, care relations and experiences that resist verbal language can become audible, visible and performable. The project asks how artistic methods can make subtle mental, emotional and relational processes perceptible without reducing them to clinical categories or treating them merely as data. Building on von der Nahmer’s work in composition, sonification, science choreography and expressive arts therapy, SonaME develops listening-based formats in dialogue with psychiatry, nursing education and interdisciplinary research.

Within SonaME, the format Listening to Care brings these questions into concrete clinical and educational contexts. It extends beyond patient experience to include the voices of nurses, care teams and nursing students. Through sound, movement, image, intuitive writing, resonance images, cards and performative scores, the project investigates care as a field of perception, relation, pressure, attention and professional identity.

During his fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, von der Nahmer develops this work in regional dialogue with AMEOS Klinikum Bremen, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Uwe Gonther, Dr. Jan Entrup and Lukas Horn, as well as with the Schule für Pflegeberufe. In these settings, Listening to Care asks how patients, nurses and future care professionals can become co-witnesses and co-researchers of lived experience: not as objects of diagnosis, but as carriers of situated knowledge.

The project investigates artistic practice as a form of knowledge production: a way of sensing, structuring and sharing what often remains hidden between body, language, institution and system. It explores how listening can become a research method for experiences that are difficult to name, measure or translate.