Sonic Acts

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 he...

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 int...

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 estu...

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 en...

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 mig...

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...

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 Si...

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, speculat...

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...

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. Traci...

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...

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...

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...

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 t...

Sensing Polluted Airs by Nerea Calvillo SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Geoengineering projects sustain a state of affairs. But how can we think about infrastructures designed to deal with polluted air in the world we all share? Maybe by testing other modes of paying attention, treating or engaging with it; through infrastructures that acknowledge a b...

Performing the Sublime Sea of Co-Mattering by Mary Maggic SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Through years of research through public ‘workshopologies’ on the project Open Source Estrogen, biohacking methodologies have proven to serve far more than spreading didactic knowledge. These protocols, which produce an existential knowing in our bodies and envir...

when we image the earth, we imagine another by Sophie Dyer & Sash Engelmann (open-weather) SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ‘As the weather image grew, Miel’s consciousness expanded, bending to the curvature of the Earth. Far from an out-of-body experience, the feeling was one of being profoundly situated: sandwiched between the sun-warmed Land, pa...

Public Experiments in Chemical Regulation by Angeliki Balayannis SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Industrial chemicals form the infrastructure of modern life. The regulation of these chemicals – in particular the dominant permission-to-pollute regime – is built on logics that produce environmental and epistemic injustices. In light of this, what kind o...

Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline by Dani Admiss SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Dani Admiss looks at how a collaborative climate justice project Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline initiates a collective rethink about what forms of repair are needed in the art sector and beyond. The current solutions of climate repair are flawed; carbon accounting and of...

‘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 morphin...

Filtered Clouds_do not store in container by Hannah Mevis 27 May 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Although a vast body of water is present in the air at all times, clouds are only perceptible by a careful combination of distance, moisture density, and light. Mist and fog, despite causing low visibility, are a way for earth-bound critters to experience clouds. As they hang low and cling to...

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Félix Blume – Desierto 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Félix Blume’s talk and ‘Desierto’ (2021, 24’) listening session transported the audience to Altiplano Potosino in central Mexico, a major gold and silver mining hub. Commissioned by ARTE Radio, the piece is filled with recordings from these elevated plains, emphasising that the desert, far from being...

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Michaela Büsse – Granular Grammar 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Michaela Büsse’s lecture and performative reading unearths how sand has become one of the Netherlands’ most important resources and focuses on the country’s centuries-long history of land reclamation. She will present clips from her new film that question how an industry that started out a...

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Jeff Diamanti – Phosphate Futures: Body, Territory, Mutiny 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In his talk ‘Phosphate Futures: Body, Territory, Mutiny’, Jeff Diamanti unfolds the figurative force of elemental phosphorus across four fields on Earth: Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Port of Elizabeth, South Africa; Laâyoune, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic; an...

Out of Focus: Down the Crimson Cliffs, past the Fjord of the Dead, over the Signal Mountain by Louis Braddock Clarke & Zuzanna Zgierska 31 March 2022 – Ot301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In a talk about their audiovisual project, ‘Out of Focus’, Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska track down the widely dispersed fragments of a meteorite that fell thousands of years ago in Imnaminomen, Gr...