Sonic Acts

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...

NIGHT AIR: SHOCK WAVES María Edurne Zuazu – Between Shouting and Shooting 5 November 2021 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In her talk ‘Between Shouting and Shooting’, María Edurne Zuazu introduces sonic weapons like the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), ‘roof knocking’, or ‘music torture', which rely on high-intensity and focused sound to suppress individuals by impairing their auditory syste...

NIGHT AIR: SHOCK WAVES Technical Involution by Yann Leguay 5 November 2021 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In his lecture ‘Technical Involution’, artist Yann Leguay speaks to the dematerialisation of sound and the evolving effects of interfaces. He follows with a performance of ‘Volta’, based on an electrical arc produced by a plasma speaker so powerful that it emanates magnetic disturbance. Y...

NIGHT AIR: SHOCK WAVES Elena Cohen – Sonic Weapons and Policing: A New York City Case Study 5 November 2021 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Sonic weapons like the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), ‘roof knocking’, or ‘music torture’ are frequently used as part of the arsenal of state violence. During Night Air: Shock Waves, Elena Cohen presented a series of case studies demonstrating how thes...

NIGHT AIR: SOIL SAMPLES 24 April 2021 - Online Transmission Soil Samples gathers four artists and researchers for performances, presentations and discussions addressing the topic of soil and its geopolitical, colonial, and bodily entanglements. The panel is made up of sound artist Felicity Mangan, researcher and 'tiny miner' Martin Howse, biogeochemist and critical ecologist Kunal Palawat working...

EXHAUST – A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON OIL AND DATA 27 February 2021 - Online Transmission Curated by Sonic Acts OVEREXPOSED artistic research resident, writer and theorist Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Exhaust features political and environmental anthropologist Omolade Adunbi, media artist and programmer Ryan Kuo, artist and geographer Helen Pritchard and interdisciplinary researcher Andrea Sempértegui,...

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Nadim Samman – As We Used to Float / Iroojrilik 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Curator Nadim Samman gives a performative lecture that takes to the psychology and aesthetic of the sea, drawing on his explorer’s path through art as co-founder of the Antarctic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 1st Antarctic Biennale in 2017. His work h...

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Dehlia Hannah – Cloud Walking: Meditations on 'A Year Without a Winter' 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Lauded curator and professor Dehlia Hannah delivers a lecture stemming from her environment-focussed publications and research projects. The meeting point of climate change and art – from the volcanic eruption that led to Mary Shelley’s Fran...

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Lukáš Likavčan – Introduction to Comparative Planetology 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Errata: The lecturer would like to correct the crediting for Holly Herndon's 'Extreme Love’ track from her PROTO album and add co-authors Jenna Sutela and Lilly Anna Haynes. Theorist Lukáš Likavčan collaborates on art projects, including the simulation alt...

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 DESIGN EARTH: Rania Ghosn – Geostories 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Architects Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy co-founded DESIGN EARTH to engage with geography in addressing humanity’s relationship to the Earth through architecture. From Monaco to Mexico City, their research develops projects around concepts such as hypothetical volcanos, t...