Sonic Acts

ISLAND by Thomas Lamers (Collectief Walden)

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Resisting or allowing, the sea floods the land sooner or later. Not more than 250 years from now, the drowning of Amsterdam is going to be a fact, performance collective Walden foretells. Their performative installation EILAND, or Island, speculates how future inhabitants of the capital will deal with that ‘end-time’. Water here becomes an ‘ending force’, a moving border pushing back the geographical coastline, but also a potential source of imagination for how one might want to deal with this near future.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://thomaslamers.nl https://collectiefwalden.nl

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

The Right to Water by Daphina Misiedjan

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Following that question of our (Western) attitude towards water, Daphina Misiedjan explores its being as a right. As researcher of environmental justice and human rights, she looks at drinkwater as a fundamental life source and its unequal distribution in the world. What does our abundant use of drinkwater here mean elsewhere in places where there is little, to none? Does access to water mean one has the right to use it? And, what about nature’s rights? Who has got the right to water?

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

Spatial Acts: Geographies of Absence and Waithood by Ola Hassanain

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Architecture situates ‘building’ as an ecological ‘emptying’ of territories and an infrastructure for continuous cycles of ‘catastrophe’, such as forced migration. One thing that remains in the wake of catastrophe in this day and age is the continuation of building as a marker for the end of catastrophe. This implies that we should all wait while building finishes, that our problems and the imposed difficulties are never urgent enough, thus constituting 'building' as the suspension of time for some, an imposed waiting as the infrastructure for the built environment.

This talk shows an essayistic video titled ‘The Line That Follows’, which challenges conventional linear perspectives on time – vantage points still used today for the representation of built forms as induction of future realities – by including practices of space-making rooted in other sensibilities. An analogous constellation, composed of manipulated perspective drawings derived from routes taken in Khartoum, abstracted forms, text, sound, and ritualistic practices – all placeholders for propositions of an unemptied space and an aspiration for an architecture that listens.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

The Future Waters of the Storm Surge by Aura Satz

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

From the perspective of the Oosterscheldekering – a protective barrier that connects the Zeeland islands and is designed to protect the Netherlands from flooding from the North Sea – water is a threat, a potential source of disaster, an alarming sound. By exploring such sites visually and sonically, filmmaker Aura Satz is reimagining emergency sirens in an age of intersecting human-made and ecological disasters.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Watch the ‘The Future Waters of the Storm Surge’ trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDWxEJGDW68&t=0s

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://iamanagram.com

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

Maritime Imagination by Mikki Stelder

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Thinking of the future imaginary of water invites a journey back into its unsettled past. In 1609, Dutch East India Company lawyer and state ideologue Hugo de Groot crafted the notion of ‘mare liberum’, or the free sea, turning the ocean into a commodity ready to be exploited. Tracing the colonial undercurrent of our maritime imagination across time, interdisciplinary researcher and writer Mikki Stelder is interested in how the ocean’s very materiality actively resists notions of commodification perpetuated by today’s legal narratives.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

Transient Marshlands, Permanent Progress – Geographies of Uncertainty by Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou & Agnès Villette

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

On the shores of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands lie three nuclear installations forming an eclectic nuclear geography. Gravelines, Doel and Borssele nuclear power stations started operating in the 1970s on the unstable marsh soils of reclaimed land – that is new land created out of the water. Today, rising sea levels due to global warming threaten the power plants imminently, requiring the construction of dykes and elevated buffers, which are currently being implemented. We explore these swampy geographies as places where the future-oriented temporality of the nuclear sector crumbles. Both nuclear reactors, as the cathedrals of the 20th century, and polders, as the epitome of hydraulic engineering, are archetypal figures of modernity. Both symbolise the conquest of natural environments and consolidate national identities. Yet, despite their ‘solidity’, the existence of these three nuclear infrastructures is under threat. As examples, they confirm the importance of countering progress and linear historical narratives of nuclear progress, and help us understand how atomic technologies permeate our lives. Rather than an undefined, deep nuclear future, we are interested in how these nuclearised polders leave the vast temporal scales of nuclear waste behind, offering an opportunity to consider how such technologies are already and urgently affecting the present.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

Dirt, Debt, Death, Data by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Oil, the 20th century’s most important non-renewable resource, lies at the centre of discourses on ecological peril and financial oppression, though its colonialist history has faded from view. In a lecture performance enacting a liquidation of Mideast history, speculative exploration, extractive economics, and fictional representation, the artist debuts a one-person collective called Oil Research Group (ORG). ORG is propelled by the concept that ‘data is the new oil’, coined in 2006 by British mathematician (and customer loyalty card inventor) Clive Humby. Oil is a finite source at the very core of both global financial markets and #nofuture petroleum wars; information, seemingly infinite, also ‘leaks’ into the collapsing tripartite structures of governance, markets, and society. The digital self is sticky, like a bird after an oil spill. Moving along the axis of four Ds: dirt, debt, death, and data, ORG traces the finitude and preciousness of our dominant technologies, along the way testing assumptions about the material and immaterial ways in which we are connected, addicted, fossilised, and one hopes, liberated in their wake.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

Five Stories on Heat by Kent Chan

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

‘Five Stories on Heat’ is a storytelling performance by Kent Chan that ruminates upon art's shared histories and futures with heat. The performance blends narratives of artmaking during the Vietnam War, Malayan and Hopi myths, with potential film plotlines and the first exhibition of Singaporean art in Europe. Like a mosaic, Chan’s storylines skip from East to West, from the past to the future. His work engages with the concept and representation of ‘the tropics’ in relation to colonialism, politics and identity, and highlights that ‘the tropics’ are not just solely defined by meteorology and geography, but also by Western narratives about aesthetic and cultural superiority.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 http://kentchan.info

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

Atlas Otherwise by Nishat Awan

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

16 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

While there have been many attempts to think and make maps differently, the atlas is usually understood as a compendium of maps rather than a form of knowledge production. How can we rethink and remake the atlas otherwise to tell stories that do not follow the logic of colonisation and of property? The recent forensic or evidentiary turn in the arts has been ushered in through the scopic view of satellites and the ubiquity of image material across digital platforms. Such practices of digital witnessing allow us to ‘see’ further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, but at the same time they create the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. The empty geometric volumes of digital cartography also intensify the absence of materiality and the removal of experience from traditional atlases. How might we rethink notions of testimony and evidence in relation to the digital, knowing also that the witnessing of violence requires forms of empathy and affectivity that are not always readily available within computational forms of knowing? How can we think of the digital not as a tool or a method, but as a realm of possibility that may allow certain lives and worlds to become (il)legible, mourn-able and addressable on their own terms? This presentation is an attempt to rethink the atlas as an archive that is produced through the entanglements of matter, moisture and our own and other’s inhabitation.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 https://nishatawan.me

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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

‘Everywhere is a here, isn’t it?’ On Toxic Entanglements by Antonia Alampi

SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022

15 October 2022

Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

‘Human actors strive to interpret, define, or contain the toxic, but how are they also acted upon? Or [...] what happens when the dump is in us? What is the duality of contamination that emerges when we think of toxicity as an ongoing and morphing process?’ (Chloe Taft, ‘What is TOXIC?’, TOXIC: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance, 2016, New Haven) Practitioners from various disciplines have long been engaged in exposing experiences of toxicity. At the heart of many such endeavours is the necessity of finding ways to make visible the complex entanglements of toxicity: of seemingly distant geographies and places; of the different reasons and interests that lie behind the manufacturing of toxicity; of the ways found to bypass national and transnational legislations; of the forms of collaboration between state apparatuses and organised crime in facilitating corporate interests at the expense of people. This talk starts with the toxic events in Alampi’s hometown, in a little village in Calabria, and moves on to discuss platforms such as Toxic Commons and the exhibitions ‘Deadly Affairs’ at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp and ‘The Long Term You Cannot Afford’ at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. What may emerge are similarities, more than differences, and proximity, more than distance. Everything being closer, way closer than one may think.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world.

Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022

Credit:

Curation & production: Sonic Acts

Recording: Engage! TV

Sound mastering: Monty Mouw

Design: Catalogtree

Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

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