Following lectures from scholars Astrida Neimanis and M Murphy at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024, both were joined on the Symposium stage by artist Sissel Marie Tonn for a conversation addressing many topics, from pollution and violence, to language, creative methods, and direct action. Guided by questions from the audience, they also address indigenous knowledge and research, discussing how to negotiate one's position within Western science and university systems, as well as direct action methods.

24 Feb 2024

Amsterdam, Netherlands

→ Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane

Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

The visit of Astrida Neimanis was made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Author and researcher Astrida Neimanis gives the opening lecture at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 Symposium. In a time of extinction and climate catastrophe, how are we to feel? Feeling intensifies, but also wavers. Feeling's temporal container pulses, its membrane now more porous: the past seeps in, the future jumps the gun. Feeling anything swims in the wake of what once was, and is burdened by what will or will not remain tomorrow. How do species-strangers care for and hold one another? What do we touch when we touch another, and what touches us back? Meditating on various instances of multispecies contact, moving from the edge of the ocean to the scientist's workbench, this talk examines the curious relationships between language and feeling, presence and absence, solid ground and being untethered at sea.

24 Feb 2024

Amsterdam, Netherlands

The lecture was followed by a Q&A session with scholar M Murphy, artist Sissel Marie Tonn, and audience members.

→ Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane

Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

The visit of Astrida Neimanis was made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this performative lecture, artist Juan Arturo García presents his research project about a nuclear reactor in Colombia. Radioactivity, earthquakes, and applications like geochronology are used as props to explore the paradoxes of trying to visualise inaccessible phenomena. García’s translation, or poetics of displacement, taps into the present cultural, mystical, and political consequences of technological deployments in Latin America.

The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Professor Alice Twemlow and audience members.

25 Feb 2024

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane

Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Filmmaker and researcher Solveig Qu Suess traces how water, infrastructure, and documentary film intertwine. Her lecture follows the flood pulse of Southeast Asia's main river – the Mekong – since the 1990s. Construction of hydroelectric dams has caused drastic changes, reconfiguring downstream landscapes to accommodate for the expansion of plantations. Instead of being governed by the seasons, Suess tells us that the river's rhythms are now dictated by the energetic demands of distant cities. Along the banks of the Mekong, protagonists navigate a rogue river. A man measures the water every morning to monitor opaque activities from faraway dams, while a boat captain leaks information to environmental activists, and cascading rapids grow into mountains, creating both a border frontier and a new home.

The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Professor Alice Twemlow and audience members.

25 Feb 2024

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Researcher, educator, and curator Margarida Mendes’ lecture asks how our understanding of the environment is shaped on different scales from the way we sense, to social protocols and intergovernmental infrastructures. For Mendes, a collective sense of our surroundings is formed by practices and policies that mould our ecological pedagogies and politics, giving space (or not) to future worlds. Through her work she transmits an ontology of the sensory, starting with her experiments in listening to riverine sites that are undergoing transformation. Addressing acts of sensory co-emergence as non-linear and intertwined with ecosystems, she questions how the protocols of listening intercede with one’s relation to environmental grief, and what role the environmental humanities has in developing better ears towards the planet.

The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with curator and researcher Rachael Rakes, as well as audience members.

24 Feb 2024

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Intro sound: Jessica Ekomane

Intro design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1978, in the Dutch towns of Veghel and Almelo, two groups of migrant women from Turkey were involved in simultaneous labour disputes. They asked their employers for collective agreements, regular work hours, higher pay, and holiday time. The labour-intensive work of plucking chicken feathers in Almelo and peeling onions in Veghel has been lost in institutional archives – only traces of these historical moments remain. As belit sağ illuminates, the institutional archive guides the researcher towards constructing a coherent narrative. Meanwhile, the subjects of those histories voice different realities, expressed through touch, smell, jokes, movement and gossip.

A historical analysis of the climate crisis reveals how power is concentrated on certain classes and resources. Countering such mechanisms entails actively investing in structures of collective care, repair (and reparations), centralising affected communities and their lineages, and collectively imagining nonlinearly and otherwise, also in the way the histories are reimagined through the archives. Here, the embodied surfaces as the basis of thought and action where there is a growing need to ground ourselves within our bodies, our communities, and our environments in order to connect to ourselves and beyond.

The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Rachael Rakes and audience members.

24 February 2024

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Moving through extended material and research from the making of the video work 'Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum', filmmaker Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva explore their creative collaboration. The second instalment in the Elemental Cinema series, which takes up the elements to reimagine the world otherwise, 'Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum' is a film dedicated to tenderness. Reproducing a radical sensibility learned from listening to the blues, to skin, heat, echoes, and listening itself, it reimagines the human and its subject formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, which manifest as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade, and mining. Instead, tenderness is explored as a raw material. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and that to attend to is to care for – to serve. Serving, we know, is the opposite of slavery, just as violence dissolves with care.

25 February 2024

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In her live multichannel performance ‘How to Love a Tree’, Hira Nabi weaves together whispered narratives from sylvan landscapes, misty mountain sides, ghosts of extraction and British imperialism, inviting us into forest time. Part of an ongoing artistic project, launched in 2019, ‘How to Love a Tree’ documents the former colonial hill stations in the blue pine forests of Murree and the Galiyat region of Pakistan. Nabi sees these places as ecosystems that are crumbling, marked by a history of imperial rule. She focuses on making remnants of this painful past visible in what are now tourist destinations in the hills. Here, traces of exploitation mingle with expressions of capitalism, while the deterioration of the environment continues.

→ Explore more of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

25 Feb 2024

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Sound logo: Jessica Ekomane

Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Starlings sing new songs when they grow-up in persistently polluted lands. Desires and sexualities shift. The relations of our bodies go far beyond the skin, stretching outwards to lands, waters, non-humans, ancestors, and those yet to come. We make one another in difficult conditions. What can we become? How can we dream of land-body desires when fossil fuel capitalism and colonialism continues to thrive?

Following Frantz Fanon’s example of ‘inserting invention into existence’, M Murphy brings Metis, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee feminist and queer land-body relations to offer a desire-based and after-pessimism vision of anti-colonial justice.

24 February 2024

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at 2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Production: Sonic Acts

Camera: Engage! TV

Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This conversation takes as its starting point Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner's most recent film, 'My Want of You Partakes of Me'. The film, which was on view as part of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 exhibition at W139, is the third instalment of a trilogy. It proposes that digestion is a fundamental condition for organisms to be in the world, a process with physiological and psychological dimensions as well as spiritual and literary implications. Told through a nonlinear, multiperspectival narrative, the film presents a political poetics of incorporation. Here the filmmakers engage in a close dialogue with author Elvia Wilk, who writes about corporeality, decomposition, and transformation through such diverse lenses as mediaeval mysticism, horror, and science fiction. Wilk was also the editor of Litvintseva and Wagner's book 'All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film' published by Sonic Acts Press in 2021. Together the three share a deep interest in historical excavation as a means of engaging the present moment, and expand on the many meeting points between their work across genres.

25 February 2024

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

→ Explore more of the 2024 Biennial programme at https://2024.sonicacts.com

Credit:

Audio: Engage! TV

Production: Sonic Acts

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

www.sonicacts.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.