Partners / The Listening Biennial / The Listening Biennial 2023 - artist works
Partners: The Listening Biennial
Nicolás 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.
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.
Ayọ̀ Akínwándé (Nigeria), 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lucia Herbas Cordero (Bolivia), Rimarispa Wakaswan, 2023
Rimarispa Wakaswan, 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.
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.
Tara Fatehi with 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.
Victor 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.
Abdellah M. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Dirar Kalash (Palestine), Un-sieged resonance, 2023
The idea for this piece was to work on sound recordings from Gaza as “invisible” power that could return, resist, persist, and reach to places it supposedly can’t. Most of the sounds in the recording were taken by different people living there since neither I nor millions of Palestinians can travel to Gaza.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Griselda Sánchez (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.
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.
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.
Zorka Wollny, Slopiewnie (with Anna Szwajgier) (Poland), 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...”.