00:00
About The Listening Biennial
In contrast to forms of cognitive capitalism, Yves Citton argues for attentional ecologies that can support and enhance sensate sovereignty across society. While cognitive capitalism instrumentalizes and individualizes attention, attentional ecologies nurture critical and creative capacities and related interdependent bonds. Ecologies of attention are fundamental to acknowledging and supporting mutuality and reciprocity; they do much to keep open what counts within the arenas of the sensible, reminding how “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (S. Weil). The second edition of The Listening Biennial is envisaged as an ecology of attention, one shaped by a critical concern for challenging existing constructs of exclusion and extraction, and that invites a shift from paying to giving attention. Such giving is emphasized as profoundly dynamic, that moves across a range of sites and scenes, and whose movements incite and seed forms of recognition and cooperation, collective joy and contestation. This includes what we may term poetic sensing, where methods of engagement are enhanced by the power of the imagination. Following such perspectives, The Listening Biennial opens onto questions of sensate sovereignty and attentional ecologies, as well as imaginary power and the acts of storying that follow, and how these contribute to communal flourishing.
As an exhibition and program of events, The Listening Biennial is facilitated through a network of participating institutions, spaces and curators, each of which supports the presentation of the Biennial across a range of sites. From its inception, the Biennial has been developed following a decentralized structure so as to nurture a greater sense for listening as what may support transcultural exchange and sharing. From Buenos Aires to Istanbul, Berlin to Manila, the Biennial searches for ways to foster links and connections, where the same commissioned audio works are shared and presented at participating venues over the same period and through diverse modes, including performance events, exhibition installations, listening sessions, radio transmissions and workshops. For the second edition of The Listening Biennial this takes shape through the presentation of 35 participating artists across 30 locations, which includes local programs of events and encounters. Through such an approach, the Biennial wishes to engage areas of concern within the arts while inviting artists to reflect upon the role listening plays in their process and work, as well as across different societal contexts.
Participating Artists:
Abdellah M. Hassak, Alejandra Canelas, Alexandre St-Onge, Arendse Krabbe, Arnont Nongyao, Aya Atoui, Ayọ̀ Akínwándé , Ayumi Paul, Dirar Kalash, Griselda Sánchez, Hasan Hujairi, Igor Jesus, Jason Kahn, Jimena Croceri & Sara Hamdy, Landra (Sara Rodrigues with Rodrigo B. Camacho), Lucia Herbas Cordero, Mamoru, Nicolás Kisic Aguirre, Planetary Listening, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Sary Moussa, Tara Fatehi with Pouya Ehsaei, Teresa Barrozo, The Observatory, Víctor Mazón Gardoqui, Yara Asmar, Zorka Wollny.
Curators: Rayya Badran, Guely Morato, Luísa Santos, Dayang Yraola.
Curatorial partners: Anastasia (A) Khodyreva, Bojana Knezevic, Isuru Kumarsinghe and Sara Mikolai, Gentian Meikleham, Debashis Sinha, Elif Gülin Soğuksu, Lucia Udvardyova.
Artistic director: Brandon LaBelle.
Curatorial associates: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Israel Martínez, Yang Yeung.
Design: Fliegende Teilchen, Berlin; Kristin Rosch.
Support from: Oficina de Autonomia network; Norwegian Artistic Research Programme / Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, Universeity of Bergen; Errant Bodies Press, Berlin; family and friends.
About Artists and Sound works
1-Abdellah Hassak (Morocco)
En contact avec l’eau (In contact with water), 2019 / 2023
En contact avec l’eau (In contact with water) is a sound piece that explores the intersection of sound, environment, and human experience. It was produced during the initial stages of an urban sound mapping workshop led by Abdellah M Hassak in the context of the Ateliers Creatifs of Dar Bellarj with QANAT in March 2019.
In collaboration with Amine Lahrach, the team conducted a small experiment in the Medina of Marrakech using a metal box filled with water to which two acoustic microphones were connected. The objective was to capture the acoustic soundscapes of this experience, to offer a participatory listening experience and inspire the audience to imagine and develop a sense of agency and belonging, which is indispensable for political and aesthetic imaginations. The piece urges us to reflect differently on our relationship with water and the world around us, highlighting the significance of active listening, empathy, and creativity in developing a deeper comprehension of our environment.
The piece has been shortened from 30 to 15 minutes without making any political or aesthetic choices, to make it more accessible within the context of limited listening time.
Abdellah M.Hassak is a sound artist, new media, music producer, and artistic director. Abdellah has collaborated with many institutions and cultural spaces in Morocco and abroad in radio and sound practice. He launched the sound platform Radio and Archive Mahattat Radio. As a DJ and producer, Hassak produces and develops syncretic Afro Futuristic music with field recordings. Under the moniker of Guedra Guedra, he explores tribal polyrhythms and underground dance floor innovations. His debut album Vexillology was reviewed by Bandcamp, Resident Advisor, The Guardian, KEXP, Pitchfork and Mixmag. Hassak is also co-founder of 4S’, a Moroccan NGO that carries the FeMENA project, dedicated to the professionalization of women in the electronic music sector.
2-Alejandra Canelas (Bolivia)
Noqanchik, 2023
Using public transportation on a daily basis involves a coming and going of faces, voices, attitudes and sounds, images, walks, anger, etc. Public transportation in Bolivia, specifically in Cochabamba, is full of interesting moments, and above all of sonorities.
A ride in the old buses, which arrived in this country more than 40 years ago, or in the so-called minibuses is the invitation of Noqanchik, which in Quechua means “we”, to listen, hear and be carried away by the sounds of the old and canned vehicles, by the voices that come and go, by the conversations and the soundscape that is born every time you get on a bus or minibus.
Alejandra Canelas is a psychologist, radio broadcaster, educator and sound artist.
She practices feminist psychotherapy with women and dissidences; and makes radio as a form of struggle, betting on establishing sincere, necessary and restorative dialogues.
She has participated in different creative processes from audiovisual and sound.
3-Alexandre St Onge (Canada)
IYE Efface IYE Pi Once Si Tu Veux IYE Du Fousse, 2023
IYE Efface IYE Pi Once Si Tu Veux IYE Du Fousse is a piece constructed with 3 short sound poems intersected by sparks of vocal debris.
Alexandre St-Onge is an intermedia artist and a sonic performer exploring the mutation of the performative body through its sonic, textual and visual mediations. Philosophiae doctor (PhD) in art (UQAM, 2015) and assistant professor at l’École d’art of Laval University, he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable and he has published over twenty works and he presented his work nationally and internationally. He founded éditions|squint|press with Christof Migone and he worked with collectives and artists such as : Marie Brassard, Simon Brown, Karine Denault, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Lynda Gaudreau, Klaxon Gueule, kondition pluriel, Suzanne Leblanc, mineminemine, Line Nault, Jocelyn Robert, Second Regard, Shalabi Effect, undo et Unzip Violence amongst others.
4-Arendse Krabbe (Denmark)
The nonhuman speakers, 2023
What does it mean to give attention to something that is habitually not given attention to? What are the forces of listening? The notion of listening as a becoming interests me. I experiment with and make exercises where listening alters habits, positions and hierarchies amongst humans and non-humans. Through mutual listening new relationships foster and another world appears. Thank you Jakob Kullberg, Ole Buck and Jenny Gräf Sheppard for your participation (in order of appearance.) Thank you Christine Krabbe and Elvermose Concert Hall for facilitating a recording. Sound mixing: Arash Pandi.
Arendse Krabbe (b. 1979) is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. She both works individually and collectively with listening being a practice that sensitises. Krabbe listens in an attempt to open and enable spaces of differences, complexities, movement and entanglements. In this regard listening holds the potential to create new and other collectives across species, systems, ethnicities and borders. Krabbe is also part of The Bridge Radio which is an online community radio platform making radio about migration politics, freedom of movements, migrant struggles, deportation and borders. Arendse Krabbe’s work materializes as audio, video, performance, text, listening situations and site-specific works in public space.
5-Arnont Nongyao (Thailand)
Opera of Kard (Market) , 2023
The work contains 12 speakers, in each speaker plays back the sounds from kard or local markets in northern Thailand. These markets take place once or twice a week and they are gathering places where people from different ethnic backgrounds congregate, communicate and trade. However, I do not see the kard as just a place where people and cultures mingle; it is also a place where unusual things congregate as well. Thus, every kard is a combination of a musical score and a jamming session; they are events that are unique. I did field recordings of 12 markets over the course of a year. I captured the various sounds and vibrations of the markets, from people chattering to birds singing and the wind blowing. These were edited, rearranged and composed into a single musical piece.The work is a set that performs a socio-cultural operatic performance of the kard where the audience is welcome to walk through or to sit and listen.
Arnont Nongyao lives in Chiangmai (TH) - Ho Chi Minh city (VN) and he is an artist interested and fell in love with the vibration of things. He likes listening to everything that inspires him to do experimental sound art. The most important teacher “the master Khvay Loeung” inspired him to listen and “destroy yourself from being yourself”. Some of his selected exhibitions include solo exhibition “Another Sound” co-work with Khvay Loeung, Sa Sa Art projects, Phnom Penh and Chiang Mai, Cambodia - Thailand (2018). and group exhibitions “Opera of Kard”, Singapore Biennale 2019, Singapore. “Currents 2019”, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. “A Visiblelity Matrix”, The Secession 2019, Vienna, Austria. Bangkok Art Biennale 2018, Bangkok, Thailand. “Postcripts” Bangkok Biennale, Bangkok, Thailand (2018).“Unstable(ry) Life”, 2016, Manif d’art, Quebec, Canada. 16th Media Art Biennale WRO 2015: Test Exposure, Wroclaw, Poland, TRANCE at Gallery VER, Bangkok, Thailand (2014). PROXIMITY, part of inSPIRACJE International at 13 MUZ, Szczecin, Poland (2014).
6-Aya Atoui (Lebanon)
Scoring fear, 2023
What started out as a psychoacoustic study turned into an observation of somatic responses generated by sounds of horror. I became interested in alchemy or the transmutation of matter in the occult sciences. In this context, dark emotions like fear or emotional responses like trauma tend to have the potency needed in order to catalyze deep transformation. We can either use our fear and trauma in an alchemical process to heal our wounds and the wounds of others or have this alchemical process push us further into an emotional chasm. This is a score orchestrated by the political climate, a score for fear and an ode to alchemy.
Aya is first and foremost an image maker whose interest in sound peaked after having seen how sound alchemized image time and time again. In her observations of said alchemy, her study of sound now falls into the orchestration of a sensory narrative through the pollination of psychoacoustics and emotive sound.
7-Ayọ̀ Akínwándé (Nigeria/UK)
Mumu LP Vol. 4: All The World’s Protest, 2022
Mumu LP Vol. 4: All The World’s Protest is a 12-track sound piece assembled from improvised jam sessions enacted as artistic responses to archive sounds from protests around the world in 2019.
This sound project grapples with the incomprehensible tension between our (in)capacity to participate and our yearning for connection and understanding, in a world falling apart with a fragile relationship between the powerful and the powerless. The piece was put together via collaboration with five musicians, working with the saxophone, drums, contrabass, guitar, and piano, and sitting in their pandemic lockdown isolation rooms.
Fascinated by the “Year of Protests”—as journalists around the globe called 2019—Akínwándé obsessively and meticulously collected news clips of demonstrations that took place all over the world, which he then combined in an installation with newly composed music.
The work is the fourth installment of Akínwándé’s ongoing artistic research project Archiving the Future. The series—an interrogation into political engagements in the public realm—was inspired by spontaneous gatherings and performative political events in Lagos, where the artist made audio and video recordings of conversations revolving around daily sociopolitical realities to evoke both intimacy and monumentality.
Ayọ̀ Akínwándé is an artist, curator, thinker and writer. With an academic background in Architecture, his practice is multi-disciplinary, working across lens-based media, installation, sound, and performance. He explores power dynamics, the relationship between the “powerful” and the “powerless,” as it manifests in the multi-faceted layers of the human reality.
He is interested in the flow of information in global democratic discourses, and how it reflects existing power structures. His ongoing project “Archiving the Future,” a long-term research work involves collecting and archiving social media screenshots, and sound recordings of conversations at bus stops in the city of Lagos. His long-term exhibition series “Power Show,” creates visual monologues and dialogues on socio-political realities in his society as he incorporate architectural processes in a spatial detailing and sectioning of his ideas and thoughts, to evoke both intimacy, and monumentality.
Akínwándé co-curated the inaugural Lagos Biennial, in 2017 and was also a participating artist at the exhibition held at the Nigerian Railway Museum. He was selected for the 2nd Changjiang International Photography and Video Biennial, and was part of the “Chinafrika-under construction” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Leipzig. In 2019, he presented solo exhibitions in Nigeria, Scotland, and Cuba for the 13th Bienal De La Habana.
8-Ayumi Paul (Germany)
The Singing Project, 2020-ongoing
The Singing Project is a collective practice and a singing sculpture. It invites a shift of attention towards connecting and co-creating a communal language of sound that is based on tuning into the present moment, listening, and intuitive singing. The project started in 2020 as part of the artists solo exhibition “Sympathetic Resonance” at Kunsthalle Osnabrück and is currently present at the Gropius Bau Museum in Berlin where it has taken various shapes such as workshops, gatherings, and an exhibition which was installed as an open score and invitation to the visitors to form the space with their voices. The project transforms museums into places of continuous song but it is ultimately rooted in and made for everyday life. It holds the potential to morph into many formats and create new connecting points, such as this audio piece for The Listening Biennial.
Ayumi Paul is an artist and composer who works with sound, performance, ritual, paper, textile, film and installation. The interdependency of all phenomena is essential to her practice, which is dedicated to listening and engaging the non-linearity of time.
She trained as a classical violinist at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and Indiana University and performed at many of the world’s major concert halls for more than 15 years, while continuously developing her multi-disciplinary approach to exploring sound and consciousness. Paul’s work is today mostly presented within visual and performative art contexts, including Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2016 and 2020), National Gallery Singapore (2018 and 2021), SFMOMA (2021), Villa Massimo (2021), Auditorium Parco della Musica (2022), Gropius Bau Berlin (2022).
9-Dirar Kalash (Palestine)
On the sonic front, 2023
This piece is based on sound recordings from Gaza, that work as “invisible” power that could return, resist, persist, and reach to places it supposedly can’t. Dirar Kalash (b. 1982, Palestine) is a musician and sound artist working within a wide range of practices and contexts, his output includes solo and collaborative albums, sound installations, sound works for radio, and music for theater. Kalash is also active as a researcher, educator and lecturer on various topics related to sound and music. He had performed and showed in various festivals and venues across Europe and Palestine.
10-Griselda Sanchez (Mexico)
Viento Sagrado, 2023
Bi Nandxó’ “sacred wind” is the sonorous testimony of the ecological, economic and social impact generated by the social, economic and ecological affectation generated by the forced construction of wind farms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The sound device of exfoliation that we hear are the towers of wind energy, wind power generation towers with the noise of the turbine rotor, the nacelle, its blades, its whistles breaking the wind, the engine, and above all a humming sound, above all a hum that can be heard meters away and that never, never stops. A sound that the older ones don’t remember and that was integrated when the wind farms arrived in this area.
Griselda Sánchez is a Ñuu Savi Sound Artist, Journalist and Community Radio Producer. For more than a decade she has been conducting workshops for community radio stations specifically with women radio broadcasters. She has received many awards from the International Radio Biennial and has participated in different national and international radio different National and International Sound Art Festivals. Her passion is to walk in the forests, jungles and highlands. She maintains a political and communicational position in defense of life. She is the author of books: La Línea; Relatos de la resistencia en Atenco (2010). Aire, No te vendas: La lucha por el territorio desde las ondas (2016), Hacedoras de estrellas (2022). Her most recent research titled Canto a la Lluvia; construcción de territorios sonoros, alteraciones y megaproyectos, is part of her thesis to obtain the degree of Ph. in Rural Development at UAM-X. Immersed in a deep process of organic repair, she maintains a close link with herbalism and participates in a bio-construction and organic agriculture laboratory in San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca.
11-Hasan Hujairi (Bahrain)
10,000 Simple Steps to Perfectly Draw an Arabian Horse, 2014
Horses have appeared in works of art throughout history. In the Gulf, Arabian horses are the subjects of thousands of paintings, photographs, and sculptures. They are the most popular subjects for artists alongside landscapes and portraits of dignitaries. In this work, Hujairi comments on the demands of an artist in the Gulf today as well as methodologies of art education. As you sit at a desk, written instructions and tools for drawing are offered to you, you are instructed to press play on an mp3 player and the headphones begin to play a composition by Hujairi. We hear the voice of a young boy (in a Khaleeji accent) instructing us with a step-by-step guide to drawing a horse. This voice is juxtaposed around the sound of Korean hammered string instrument, the yangeum, which the artist was studying at the time of producing the work while pursuing his doctoral degree in music composition in Seoul, South Korea. This placement of the voice above the instrument reflects the artist’s questioning of art pedagogy.
This work was first presented (as an instructional sound piece/installation) at the EOA Gallery (London, UK) between November 2014 and January 2015 as part of a group exhibition called NEVER NEVER LAND. The sound-only aspect of the work also was published online by Leonard Music Journal as part of a curated selection by Lucas Ligeti in a series called Sonic Commentary: Meaning Through Hearing.
Hasan Hujairi (b. 1982) is a Bahraini artist, composer, and writer. His work often explores the notion of the outsider, confronting (historiographic) superstructures, and the nature of constructing narratives within time. He holds a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) in music composition from Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea), where he researched reorienting the narrative associated with the maverick composer tradition to be more inclusive of composers working outside the Western classical music tradition. He also holds a Masters of Economics from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, Japan) in economic history and regional economics, and wrote his thesis on the significance of conceiving the Gulf region in both its littorals within a Braudelian historiographic framework. He joined the Sharjah Art Foundation as manager of the music department in early 2023.
12-Igor Jesus (Portugal)
Fotogramas, 2023
Fotogramas is a body of work that puts together two archives of images and sounds. Adopting the technological principles of the sonars and the modular synths, Igor Jesus created a dispositive, which operates as a prosthesis for the images giving a voice to each one in a proto-language. In this process, the artist speculates about the possibilities of sound within each matter.
Igor Jesus (Lisbon, 1989) holds a BA in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. He was awarded the Caixa Prize for Young Artists (2022) and the Crear/sin/prisa, Cervezas Alhambra /ARCO (2019), and he was a finalist in the EDP New Artists (2017). Jesus was an artist in residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2017) with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Jesus exhibits regularly, in solo exhibitions such as Banho Maria (Escola das Artes Porto, 2022); Clávier à Lumier (Rialto6, 2021); Chamber (Capela Carlos Alberto, 2020); Safelight (Gal. Filomena Soares, 2019); Strob (No Entulho/Artworks, 2019); Bound to the Earth (Kunstraum Botschaft, 2018); Anthropophagy (Cologne Art Fair, 2018); Love you to the bones (Gal. Filomena Soares, 2017); Liebe bis unter die haut (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2017) and Chessari (Solar Gallery, 2016), and also participates in several group exhibitions. His works are part of various private and public art collections, such as António Cachola, Fernanda Ribeiro, Fundação EDP, Norlinda e José Lima, Teixeira de Freitas e Associados, among others, in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands and Brazil.
13-Jason Kahn (US/Switzerland)
On Any Sunday, composed and recorded March 25 - April 9, 2023
The title of this composition refers to the fact that all the sounds used here were recorded on various Sundays. The piece starts with a recording of my daughter and her friend playing a common counting game here in Switzerland while we were in a tram traveling back from a day at the local indoor swimming pool. At the end of the piece they’re counting again, but this time because I’d just explained to them that by counting the number of seconds after a thunder clap one can determine how far away lightning has struck. It was a very rainy day.
The recordings of the soccer match also took place on a Sunday, this time at the Letzigrund Stadium here in Zürich where I live. The stadium is actually just across the street from where my studio is situated. I can clearly hear the games from the windows in my studio, but for these recordings I went down to street level to make the recordings, in the midst of all the rival fans, the riot police and people going home after the game. There was no riot on this day, fortunately.
Other sounds in the piece were recorded in the warren of subterranean passages beneath the building where I have my studio. I used my voice and movement through the different corridors and stairwells to explore the spaces. Although I’ve had my studio here nearly three years, I only first discovered some of these places while making recordings for this composition. I often prefer these dirty sound environments, with lots of background noises, like the hum of machines, air circulation systems, buzzing lights, water gurgling through pipes and so.
And for this reason, when I recorded the guitar, electronics and harmonium, this all took place in a small room adjacent to my actual studio, with the windows wide open and all the Sunday sounds pouring in. It almost felt like playing outdoors but with the preferred acoustics of a closed space. I’ve included these more standard musical sounds because the piece isn’t just about the environmental sounds I’ve found on various Sundays but more about the idea of social space and how all these various sounds contribute to my daily life. I also hope to show that there should be no hierarchy between these recorded environmental sounds and the sounds played on my instruments. It’s all a quotidian music to my ears.
Born 1960 in New York, Jason Kahn is a artist, musician and writer. He lives in Zürich. Kahn has presented his installations and public-space interventions internationally. These works focus on the idea of space: the conceptual and physical juncture points, its production and dissolution, and our relation to it as a political, social and environmental medium.
As an electronic musician, guitarist, vocalist and percussionist Kahn performs as soloist and collaborates with others in the context of free improvised music. He has also composed numerous electroacoustic pieces and graphical scores. His work can be heard on over two hundred releases. Kahn’s written work has appeared in books, magazines and as liner notes to audio publications. His other activities include sound pieces for radio, film, dance and theater. Various art schools have invited Kahn to give talks and workshops, including the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, École Supérieure d ́Art de Mulhouse, Cal Arts and Huddersfield University.
14-Jimena Croceri Sara Hamdy (Argentina/Egypt)
Wood Songs, 2019-ongoing
Wood Songs is a vocal improvisation project inspired by wood veins and knots. The project relates the movement and the emotionality of the human voice to the movement of the tree’s inner fluids. Started by artist Jimena Croceri this collaboration was performed by artist Sara Hamdy using the drawings of two found pieces of wood as a visual score.
Jimena Croceri is an Argentinian artist living and working in Buenos Aires. Her artistic practice is characterised by intention and experiment, by resistance and fluidness. Adopting a laboratory-like method, which isn’t either rational or sterile but more curious than precise, her work consists of various elements that are all protagonists: time, poetry, collaboration, correlation and coincidence. Using both daily materials and naturally occurring elements, her work probes points of flexibility between gestures, rituals and performances. Recent residences and awards include the 2020 Pernord Ricard Fellowship to be artist in residence at the Villa Vassileff (Paris,France) Croceri’s performances, workshops and exhibitions have been hosted, among others, by Museum of Sex (New York 2022) Ming Contemporary Art Museum (Shangai, 2022) Centro Cultural kirchner (BsAs, 2021) Raven Row gallery (London,2019), Ausstellungsraum Klingental (Basel, 2021 & 2019), Cabaret Voltaire (Zürich,2019), Museum of Modern Art (BsAs, 2021), Museum of Latin American Art (Buenos Aires, 2017) Faena Art Center(BsAs,2017), ,among other cultural institutions and venues.
Sara Hamdy is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and founder of the “Sonic Spaces” initiative, which aims to archive and promote sound studies and creative sonic practices in Egypt. Her research-led, practice-based art projects revolve around the potential of sound as a medium within contemporary visual art. Her work outputs contain installations, texts, sounds, drawings, and live performative acts. She has participated in a number of exhibitions and artistic events related to sound and visual arts since her graduation in 2009. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, from Helwan University, “Department of Oil Painting,” Egypt. She obtained an artistic fellowship program at the Radio Corax Foundation in Germany and an artistic residency at the Pro Helvetia Foundation in 2019, joined the rewriting Criticism program at Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2017, and in 2016 was enrolled in Mass Studio Alexandria-Egypt, and in 2013 in the “HWP Program” at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon.
In her artwork, she explores the architectural and spatial impact of mental health institutions and themes of communication, human and non-human languages, and space with the aim of deconstructing and understanding the hidden agency of material and immaterial systems and imagining alternative, unassuming spaces that emphasize the subjectivity of science and architecture.
15-Landra (Sara Rodrigues with Rodrigo B. Camacho) (Portugal)
The Great Succession, 2022/23
With the help of a microscope, Landra samples and analyses a wide variety of soil types, searching for the way microorganisms interact with themselves and their surroundings. It then becomes clear how tiny invisible and inaudible critters produce the very environment plants and animals emerge from. In the absence of limitations, all terrestrial biomes steadily move towards becoming a millennial forest. In an attempt to better understand our own place in this planet, Landra goes on to sonify the web of life by making evident how it, if unimpeded, expands in ever more complex and diverse ways, through a succession of fixed ecological stages.
Sara Rodrigues and Rodrigo B. Camacho met at Goldsmiths, University of London whilst studying music composition and sonic art and, since 2015, have been working together. Their projects take the forms of audiovisual composition, performance, installation and public space interventions. They are interested in systems which organically last in time and space; and respond flexibly to constant change. Beyond their artistic career, permaculture and microbiology are fields they investigate into and whose knowledge they technically apply in their projects. Sara and Rodrigo live in a place they call Landra, also the name their artistic practice is known by. The term concretely refers to acorns which, in the Iberian northwest, stand as a symbol for autonomy, sovereignty and self-sufficiency.
16-Lucia Herbas Cordero (Bolivia)
Rimarispa Wakaswan, 2023
or Talking with the cows is a proposal to listen to the inter-species dialogues that take place in the cultivated lands of the Pocona valleys in Cochabamba, between humans and oxen. The yunta, a farming technology, has existed for approximately 5000 years, and arrived in these territories more than 500 years ago, along with cattle. It took some time for the local population and these animals to speak the same language.
Today, agricultural production depends almost entirely on the yunta and the language that activates it. These sonorities not only allow them to communicate, coexist and work together, but also to transform and compose the sound ecosystem we inhabit.
Lucia Herbas Cordero is a dancer-performer, historian and radio broadcaster. Her work inhabits contemporary art and action-research from different methodologies, formats and experimentations. Her questions and practices are traversed by memory, the body, orality, movement and territoriality. She has been part of several processes of research and scenic creation, sound and living arts. For the last 12 years she has been part of community and self-managed counter-information and radio projects, from where she has begun to explore and reflect on the world of sound. She has a double residence (rural-urban) like most of the migrant population of Cochabamba. She still believes in autonomous spaces and in the links and desires that sustain them.
17-Mamoru (Japan)
NEVER BE NO VOICE - a reflection on a collective voice, 2023
The artist introduces himself and the title of the piece and it quickly turns into a monologue of the artist’s, which is weaved with an intricate soundscape made with a lot of recordings from different projects and, part of a finished work which was never published before and recordings that were not even selected to be used in any piece. As the piece reveals the essence of several projects, which all have something to do with the idea of collective voice, it becomes an artist’s collective voice and an audio invitation to reflect on the idea of listening. mamoru was born in Osaka. He lives and works in Brussels and Shizuoka, Japan. He earned B.F.A. (Jazz performance) from The City University of New York in 2001 and M.F.A.(Artistic Research) from The Royal Academy of Arts and The Royal Conservatory, The Hague in 2016. The potentiality of what one can experience and perceive through listening has played the most significant role in mamoru’s artistic practice. Over the course of his listening journey, the range of things/matters to be listened to has been expanded from the subtle sounds in everyday life to texts and images that stimulate sonic imagination, and into voiceless histories of the oppressed. The research and fieldwork often takes years before becoming a performance, lecture, installation, film, or video essay. The works incorporate voice, speech, written text, subtitles, field recordings, music and often involve collaboration with others. Recent appearances include “THIS probably IS NOT AN EXHIBITION(then otherwise what?)(Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, 2022)”, “Amongst the Silence”(Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, 2021), “Present Day in Times Past”(Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, 2019-20), “Parallax Trading”(das weisse haus, Vienna, 2019), “10th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions – Mapping the Invisible (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2018), “Reperformed Stereotypes”(iCAN, Yogyakarta, 2017).
18-Nicolas Kisic Aguirre (Peru)
Parasite Soup, 2023
I begin Parasite Soup with the words in Spanish, “algunos lugares siempre serán para nosotres, y otros nunca más lo serán. Allí donde el ritmo de nuestro cuerpo coincide con el ritmo del lugar, se sincroniza nuestra existencia.” (“some places forever will be for us, and others will never be again. Wherever the rhythm of our bodies coincides with the rhythm of a place, we synchronize our existence.”)
During a conversation with Mexican percussionist Jonathan Rodriguez, he explained his attraction to Douglas, Arizona / Agua Pietra, Sonora, the borderlands where he grew up, and where his family is. “Everything moves slower,” Jonathan said, hinting at how rhythm was also a concept of place. We continued talking, “perhaps one’s internal rhythm is built out of the rhythm of a place when we grow in it.” Then, as we move elsewhere, we miss being in synch.
Parasite Soup serenades the places we miss, the ones we never belonged to, and those we will always belong to. I decided to slow down most of the recordings that compose the piece, including Jonathan’s drumming and Melika Hadžić violin, recorded outdoors in France in 2017. Melika and Jonathan are in dialogue with places captured in field recordings that represent some of the rhythms that have grown in me.
Parasite Soup invites listeners to slow down, an invitation especially extended to those surrounded by fast-paced urban environments as foreigners or strangers, missing their connection to places that grew in them easier, quieter, and slower rhythms.
Parasite Soup is part of a series of audio experiments produced and transmitted via my project Radio Parazit. Radio Parazit–“Parasite Radio”–contains and broadcasts my explorations around ‘Diasporic Imaginaries,’ initially created for Off-Site over prompts, discussions, connections, and locations. Through a series of experimental radio broadcasts, I think and share out loud about experiences, thoughts, and hopes with material derived from personal stories rendered in artistic and acoustic explorations. My voice, however, is not singular. Instead, I suggest a singular perspective of a constellation of voices I have encountered over the years. These voices have shaped my own and have shortened the distance between the subjects and places that build my own diasporic experience in this world.
Nicolás Kisic Aguirre is an architect and transdisciplinary sound artist who creates machines that explore and illuminate the social and political nature of sound in public space. Informed by his background in architecture and a lifelong fascination with machines, Kisic Aguirre designs and builds sound instruments that explore the connection between public space, power, technology, and sound. His critical and aesthetic practice is open-source, collaborative, and deeply engaged with the public.
19-Planetary Listening (Germany)
Elsewhere, here, 2023-ongoing
Under a twilight sky, clouds of dark wings that splash the sky with their mesmerizing chorus... to disappear into the life of aerial beings, their occupation of a city park, suddenly. Planetary Listening is a group of international, interdisciplinary artists and researchers, which formed in Berlin in 2021 with the intention to think together around questions such as: What might it mean to listen beyond the human? Is it possible to reorient our sensing, and understanding of voice and agency, to extend toward other life-forms? Can artistic practices open pathways of co-existence and ecological collaboration so as to nurture sustainable futures and planetary imaginaries? Through shared forms of study, dialogue, situated research and creative work, the group explores what a planetary ethics might be.
20-Rouzbeh Akhbari (Iran)
Perturbation: A Speculative History of Future(s) Past, 2023
A serpentine hallucination taking place across three parallel timelines, Perturbation: A Speculative History of Future(s) Past connects the intertwined geopolitics of the Strait of Hormuz to vastly distant geographies. With stories told from multiple viewpoints, Perturbation roots the geopolitics of the Hormuz Region in individual experiences of law, citizenship, emigration, colonialism, culture, and history.
Rouzbeh Akhbari (b. 1992, Tehran) is an artist working primarily in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and often exists at the intersections of storytelling, archival research, critical infrastructure studies and human geography. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Rouzbeh uncovers the minutiae of power that regiments the world around us. He was formerly trained in sculpture and installation at OCAD University and holds a graduate degree in visual studies from Daniel’s School of Architecture, Design and Landscape. Rouzbeh is currently a Ph.D. student at
University of Toronto’s School of Geography and Planning and also one half of Pejvak, a long-term collaborative duo with Felix Kalmenson.
21-Sary Moussa (Lebanon)
Retrieval, 2023
This sound piece is based on three different field recordings taken in various locations in Lebanon and chosen based on their sonic properties: a herd of sheep in the South, a taxi ride in Beirut, and sounds of banging on metal inside the Rashid Karame dome in Tripoli. The three recordings were used as source material but also as triggers to drive synthesizers and drum machines. A reactive system was built to respond to the original recordings by setting off a chain of generative events and effects. The response depends on the sonic and dynamic properties of each source material. The string section is the only element outside of this system.
Sary Moussa is a sound designer, producer and engineer active in the Beirut experimental and underground scene since 2008. His work ranges from drone driven music to dance floor electronica with a focus on sound design and sonic textures. In addition to his solo work, Moussa has also composed music for theater and dance performances, films and installations. He released his first full-length album Issrar (2014 on Ruptured) under the moniker radiokvm and his latest record Imbalance (Other People - 2020 on Other People) as Sary Moussa.
22-Tara Fatehi and Pouya Ehsaei (Iran/UK)
From the Lips to the Moon, 2023
Words fly from the lips and swavel to the moon. all the way. gathering dust. gathering lust, love, amnesia. somewhere in space, in total darkness before earthrise, you realise that swavel is not a word but remind yourself that maahi ro har vaght az aab begiri taazas, as long as you can ignore the fishy smell. laden with subfrequencies, bile, politics, capital, and carbon monoxide, the words hit the moon, making craters, mountains and empty river beds.
From the Lips to the Moon is a collaboration between Tara Fatehi and Pouya Ehsaei. Playing with the synergies of words, melodies, languages and beats, Pouya’s music and soundscape merge with Tara’s voice and words to tell non-stories in goosebumps and half-familiar languages. Pouya and Tara curate From the Lips to the Moon as regular music and poetry nights in London where they invite other poets, musicians and visual artists to join them in creating live performances.
Tara Fatehi is a multidisciplinary artist, performer and writer. She creates poetic-political pieces across performance, text, movement, video and voice. Tara’s work plays with ambiguity, mistranslation, disjunction, unfinishedness, and messy narratives found and lost in everyday life. She has performed at the Royal Academy of Arts, Nuffield Theatre, Nottdance, Chapter, Julidans and Montpellier Danse among others. Focusing on the interrelations of archives and performance through her doctoral thesis (2020), Tara has created the project and published the book Mishandled Archive, dispersing 365 fragments of family documents through performance and photography. In 2021, Tara was the first ever resident artist at the United Nations Archives at Geneva.
Pouya Ehsaei is a composer, sound designer and electronic musician. He experiments with different compositional and sound synthesis techniques to create a sonic passage through hypnotic soundscapes, industrial beats, intricate sound miniatures, epic soundscapes, fractal polymeric rhythms and pulsating hard hitting sub frequencies. He is the bandleader of the electronic jazz group Ariwo and the creative leader of Parasang, an initiative that brings together musicians from all around the globe to create one-off improvised concerts. He has performed at the Royal Albert Hall, Montreux Jazz Festival, Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre, the Royal Academy of Arts, Womex, Womad and Fusion festival among others. He regularly collaborates with other artists on dance, performance, video game and film projects.
23-Teresa Barrozo (Philippines)
I want this but
||: this is not what i want :||, 2023
I want this but ||:this is not what i want:|| is an investigation into the malleable, sometimes manufacturable, nature of truth. Originally exhibited as a two-room sound installation for Pablo Gallery (Manila, Philippines), this version is reworked for a single space retaining the “trompa” (horn speaker) and several smaller speakers engaging in a violent cacophony of mutated words: True, Good, Beautiful. To further emphasize the cyclical nature of the piece, the listeners are bound by musical repeat marks found in the space. They are also invited, with the addition of standing microphones, to contribute their voices in the droning soundscape by repeating the words they hear in their own languages, creating a literal echo chamber. Does a truth become truer when amplified by many? Does repetition legitimize goodness and beauty? This work is a result of a personal struggle on abuse of power, aggravated by the Philippines’ culture of historical revisionism and propaganda.
Teresa Barrozo (b.1982, Philippines) is a sound artist, composer and curious listener with a wide range of work for film, theatre and dance. Her compositions have been featured in the Asian Composers League Festivals in Japan and Thailand, and in the Asia-Pacific Weeks in Germany. Her film music works has been part of major international film festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Locarno and Berlin, to name a few. She was a recipient of the Ani ng Dangal Award from the Philippines’ National Commission for Culture and the Arts and has attended the Biosphere Soundscape International Internship Program. In 2014, she became a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council in New York where she focused on sound art and design, performance, and contemporary sonic practices in listening, field recording, acoustic ecology, neuromusic, and electronic and computer music composition.
Influenced by new practices in contemporary art, tradition in aural orchestration and storytelling in cinema and theatre, Barrozo’s current sound work expands to various disciplines, often exploring and exposing new perspectives in listening culture. She is interested in the dialogue between sound and man while investigating man’s relationship to itself and the environment.
24-The Observatory (Singapore)
Refuse, 2023
REFUSE was an inter-media exhibition that draws from the band’s past and present influences, bringing together their interests in fungi and mycelial networks to explore the twin ideas of decomposition and composition from biological and musical perspectives. The presentation comprised a time-based installation space and archive, and speaks to The Observatory’s constantly evolving methodologies, the communities that surround them, as well as the role we play in the Singapore music scene. A video documentation that serves as a kind of fruiting body of this exhibition and as an artwork of its own will be submitted for the presentation of the Biennial at Parola in Manila. The sound element of the video comprises various methods of sonification of fungi to be perceived as inter species narration – a kind of composition through decomposition. Separately for the Listening Biennale, we propose to present the audio documentation from one of the stations in REFUSE. In old audio playback formats (like cassette tapes and CDs), we had observed that fungi, in the form of mould, had always made its symbiotic presence to exist with the tape or CD. This resulting collaboration with the recorded audio usually created a completely new remix of the material. In present day digital medium, we have quite successfully excluded fungi’s ability to collaborate. For this work, we took a speculative approach to reintroduce fungi’s collaboration with digital media. Bio-electric signals obtained from a jar of growing Ganoderma sp fungi were sent through a selected playlist from The Observatory’s discography. With this, the fungus was free to remix and deejay this playlist to its eclectic fancy. As the discography of the band is over a period of 20 plus years with varied genre trajectories, one can anticipate the contrast from the meditative to extreme noise. The Observatory - far from silent and objective as its name suggests - is a band whose music and cultural ethos is to respond and speak back to the contemporary afflictions in Singapore and the global milieu. Its current constellation comprises multi-instrumentalists Cheryl Ong, Dharma and Yuen Chee Wai who tread on improvisation, inter-media experimentation and noise-adjacent territories. In confronting new forms of disorders, The Observatory restlessly turns upon itself to agitate, to comfort and to resist. Drawing on old and new lexicons, The Observatory seeks to bridge artists and expressions. Two decades on, the band’s polymath practice encompasses music and performance; in-person festivals and online radio shows; touring gigs and interdisciplinary exhibitions.
25-Víctor Mazón Gardoqui (Spain)
Ecología de los medios en el Salar de Thunupa / Media ecology on Thunupa Salt flat, 2015
A study of media technology, communication networks and pollution in the horizontal and vertical axis of the landscape of Thunupa salt flat, and how this hertziosphere spreads through inhabited environments. The salt flat is a vast ecosystem that contains more than 60% of the world’s lithium reserves and a tactical place used by the military, smugglers, tourists and satellites that calibrate their sensors due to the flatter and more reflective surface on earth. Through a system of self design receivers to listen to radio signals of geogenic and anthropogenic origin, the listening action amplified natural, human and technological electromagnetic ecosystems at wavelengths that traverses the species but remain inaudible.
Víctor Mazón Gardoqui is an artist focusing on exposing the unheard and unseen, addressing the inaccessible and experiencing vulnerability and awareness in the viewer. Perception and altered states are key concepts in the performances through the use of sound or light. His art practice explores amplification, electromagnetic phenomena and images of invisible fields by using locative audio and custom electronics. His work materializes in three main fields: actions or site-specific performances through experimental processes, exhibitions as consequences of previous actions and collaborative works through seminars to form a communal dialog. He is a senior educator and professional working with open hardware and experimental circuit design. Mazón Gardoqui researches open hardware at RIAT and coordinates workshops and educational formats in the domain of device-studies and experimental sensory applications. His work has been performed or exhibited in museums, biennials, galleries, billboards, urban screens and TV/radio stations in Africa, Russia, Nepal, North America, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Antarctica and numerous locations across Europe.
26-Yara Asmar (Lebanon)
5:04 PM, 2023
If fear creeps so easily into the fantastical worlds that shield us from real-life horrors, how do these tiny universes serve their original purpose? And why is it that the things we choose not to listen to always find a way through the cracks where they fester and mold? 5:04 PM is an exercise in naps, and waking up from them - an acknowledgment of how the things we tune out will always find the old rocking chair in our attics and swing back and forth in them violently until the creaking is earsplitting. I recorded the sounds of this piece using an old harpsichord, programmable music boxes, deconstructed toy pianos, accordion and metallophones, run through tape loops and pedals.
Yara is a musician and puppeteer from Beirut, Lebanon. She incorporates accordion, metallophone, electronics and prepared toy piano in her work.
27-Zorka Wollny (Poland)
Slopiewnie (with Anna Szwajgier), 2010
“Slopiewnie” was inspired by the slavic traditions of the solstice night (Ivan Kupala night) and made in collaboration with the group of students. The performance premiered at the lake site in Jelenia Góra, and later was played in the empty hall of the Shopping Mall in Poznan, at midnight of Summer Solstice, as a part of Summer Theater Festival Malta. The audience was sitting in the dark, surrounded by twenty performers. “There is a belief that the eve of Ivan Kupala is the only time of the year when ferns bloom. Prosperity, luck, discernment, and power befall whoever finds a fern flower. Therefore, on that night, village folk roam through the forests in search of magical herbs, and especially, the elusive fern flower. Traditionally, unmarried women, signified by the garlands in their hair, are the first to enter the forest. They are followed by young men...”.
Born 1980 in Krakow, Poland. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her works function at the boundary between the music and visual arts and are strictly related to architecture. She collaborates—in a director-like mode—with musicians, actors and dancers and every time with members of local communities too. She has presented her projects a.o. at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), Steirischer Herbst Festival (2019), Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in Berlin (2018), CTM Festival in Berlin (2020, 2018, 2015), Savvy Contemporary in Berlin (2017, 2016), De Appel in Amsterdam (2017), Heroines of Sound Festival in Berlin (2017), International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York (2017), among others. Between 2004 and 2011 (before moving to Berlin) she collaborated frequently with composer Anna Szwajgier. “Our compositions were purely acoustic. We didn’t use any electronic equipment or speaker amplification. In our practice we were exploring sounds coming from everyday life – noises made by the human body, objects, those created involuntarily when making more or less casual activities such as chatting, walking, laughing, munching, sighing, rubbing things onto each other. What interested us most is how such actions, when made by a group of people change the quality of sound from obvious into indefinable. How timbre becomes a dominating factor. We were also using a lot of various untypical instruments – objects usually used for purposes other than sound-making: hoes, high heeled shoes, boules, plastic pipes, beads…”.