Sonic Acts

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.

Writer, musician, and xenologist, Adriana Knouf is the first (known) trans artist to send artwork into outer space. Her multidisciplinary practice is inspired by, amongst many other sources, queer/feminist science-fiction, trans-activist zines from the 1970s, and The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) by the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. She is the founding facilitator of the tranxxenolab, ‘a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno’. Knouf designs and sells synthesiser modules through her company 'selestium modular', also performing with them live under the name Selestra.

Following her lecture – 'Some Fragments of Xenology: ‘you realise that the fieldlines intersect at the unexpected moment already’ – at the Sonic Acts Biennial ‘24 symposium, Knouf sat down to talk with Hannah Pezzack. Their conversation journeys far and wide, covering everything from Elon Musk and SpaceX, to fungi and modular synthesisers.

9 March 2024

W139, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Research: https://tranxxenolab.net/

Synth modules: https://modular.selestium.net/

Sound: https://selestra.bandcamp.com/album/d...

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

Credi:

Interview: Hannah Pezzack

Camera: Roman Ermolaev

Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser

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.

Hydrofeminist scholar Astrida Neimanis – author of the formative book 'Bodies of Water' (2017) – is interviewed by Sonic Acts curator and editor Hannah Pezzack in the context of Sonic Acts Biennial 2024. Ahead of the workshop Weathering Together, which took place at Zone2Source on 22 February, and their presentation, 'Holdfast (Learning Feeling)' at the Sonic Acts symposium, Neimanis dived into her research and writing practices. The engaging conversation touched on poetry, hydrophones, and liquid language.

22 February 2024

Zone2Source (Amstelpark), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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

Credi:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Sound mastering: Gleb Foulga

Realised by Paradiso and 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 alsomade possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

www.sonicacts.com

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19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam

Speculating on logistics as a project of time management, Liquid Time’s lecture performance at Maritime Frictions considers processes of distributing, expropriating and configuring planetary time.

Based on field research carried out in the IJ estuary to the west of Amsterdam, the duo maps out three sites throughout time that each, in their own way, encapsulated enact a particular temporal dynamic within maritime space: from the harbour that shielded Dutch East India Company ships from storms in the sixteenth century, to the newly opened Sea Lock – the largest moving metal structure in the world – designed to allow mega ships to enter Amsterdam.

Along the way, Liquid Time charted the oceanic and anthropogenic rhythms that form each location, the building blocks of what they call the ‘infrarhythm’ of logistics.

Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen) are a research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds. Miriam Matthiessen is a researcher interested in critical logistics and urban political ecology. Jacob Bolton is an architectural researcher interested in supply chain violence and resource struggle.

Drawing together artistic and critical practices, Sonic Acts and FieldARTS’ collaborative event Maritime Frictions also included field presentations from Harpo ’t Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance by Velma Spell, ending with a DJ set by Nessim.

→ Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions

Credit:

Video editing: Bin Koh

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

Maritime Frictions is a 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.

19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam

Fred Carter’s introductory talk at Maritime Frictions follows hydrological and logistical flows across transitional waters of the IJ estuary and the oil terminals of the Port of Amsterdam. Tracing the emergent turn to fieldwork across practice-based and environmental research, Carter asks: how might we develop practices and tactics in accordance with the IJ’s estuarine field?

Fred Carter has been a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre and an associate researcher at Linnaeus University. In 2022, Carter was Saltire Emerging Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where he is co-director of the residency programme FieldARTS. His debut poetry chapbook, Outages, will be published by Veer2 in 2023.

Drawing together artistic and critical practices, Sonic Acts and FieldARTS’ collaborative event Maritime Frictions also included field presentations from Harpo ’t Hart and Frank Bloem (Embassy of the North Sea), a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, a lecture by Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, ending with a DJ set by Nessim for the after party.

→ Explore more of Maritime Frictions at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Video editing: Bin Koh

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

Maritime Frictions is a 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.

Embassy of the North Sea (Frank Bloem and Harpo 't Hart) – Fieldwork Presentation

19 May 2023 – Ruigoord, Amsterdam

During their fieldwork presentation for Maritime Frictions, Frank Bloem and Harpo 't Hart observed the port of Amsterdam from a chemical point of view, following their nose and ears to smell and listen to the stories of life in the harbour. Throughout their presentation, the pair interweaved narratives of extractivism and international trade told by biological and fossilised bulk goods with stories of the marine life living on the hulls of cargo ships.

Founded in 2018, The Embassy of the North Sea departs from the idea that the North Sea belongs to and should own itself. It researches how nonhumans, from phytoplankton to ship wrecks to cod fish, can become full-fledged members of our society. The Embassy works towards 2030, when we (humans) hope to emotionally, juridically and politically relate ourselves to the sea in a fundamentally different way.

Maritime Frictions was a collaborative event organised by Sonic Acts and FieldARTS’ in Ruigoord, west of Amsterdam. The programme included a listening walk with Lance Laoyan, talks by Fred Carter and Charmaine Chua, a performance lecture by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen), a screening of Michaela Büsse’s ‘Building with Nature’ (2022), a sound performance from Velma Spell, and DJ set by Nessim.

→ Explore the more from the programme at https://sonicacts.com/agenda/maritime-frictions

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Roman Ermolaev

Video editing: Bin Koh

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

Maritime Frictions is a 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.

Latent Amongst the Air by Mint Park

27 October 2022

OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In her opening presentation and performance for Night Air: Breathing with Clouds, sound and new media artist Mint Park expands on her fascination with drift, noise and dissipation, discusses the making of her Sonic Acts commission 'Turbulence Studies: Latent Amongst the Air', and considers the dynamic ways we might make our atmospheres visible.

Born in Seoul, Mint Park is currently based in Amsterdam. Working at the intersection of music, technology, science and art, her audio-visual practice focuses on the experience of the inter-weaving physical environment and virtual spaces with immersive sound, light, and spatial apparatuses. Besides her own projects, she runs Unheard Records, a label focused on femme, minority, queer and under-represented experimental artists. Night Air: Breathing with Clouds invited us to inhale deeply, sensing the fluctuations and formation processes of the atmosphere around us.

The programme featured a presentation and performance by Park, a live film score performance with Sébastien Robert, a cloud tasting with artist Hannah Mevis and a screening of Ho Tzu Nyen's film 'The Cloud of Unknowing'. The evening culminated at high altitude and low pressure, with DJ sets from Emiranda, Rapala700, Bugasmurf and DJ G2G.

NIGHT AIR Night Air is a series of Sonic Acts events that aim to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations.

More information about Breathing with Clouds can be found at: https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-breathing-with-clouds

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Design: Toni Brell

Video editing: Roman Ermolaev

Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan

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