Tune in for episodes two and three of Sonic Trax, Sonic Acts' new podcast series, where we explore the organization's rich archive. Join us as we uncover the captivating stories behind the evolution of sound art and its lasting impact, bringing these insights closer to you! In the two-part podcast Touched by Sound: Re-imagining the Legacy of Michel Waisvisz , hosts Sève I.V. Janssen and Flavien Gillié explore the profound impact of artist, performer, and instrument maker Michel Waisvisz (1949–20...
Feb 24, 2025•32 min
Tune in for episodes two and three of Sonic Trax, Sonic Acts' new podcast series, where we explore the organization's rich archive. Join us as we uncover the captivating stories behind the evolution of sound art and its lasting impact, bringing these insights closer to you! In the two-part podcast Touched by Sound: Re-imagining the Legacy of Michel Waisvisz , hosts Sève I.V. Janssen and Flavien Gillié explore the profound impact of artist, performer, and instrument maker Michel Waisvisz (1949–20...
Feb 24, 2025•26 min
What does it mean to DJ an archive? In the debut instalment of a new podcast series by Sonic Acts, junior curator Hannah Pezzack interviews Ruben Verkuylen ( The Social Lover ) about his DJ set from the 2024 Biennial, where he reimagined Sonic Acts archival material through turntablist techniques, sample pads, and effects. Recorded live at Het HEM and later broadcast by NTS Radio, his set drew upon a rich array of concerts, lectures, and conversations from 2003 to 2006 – a transformative era for...
Jan 21, 2025•51 min
Accompanied by her modular synthesiser, xenologist scholar and artist Adriana Knouf 's presentation is proposed as a love letter. Eschewing the binary logic that pervades Western thinking, Knouf argues that all beings – trans*, cis, and xeno – are in a constant process of flux and transformation, always already more-than-human. From syringes of oestrogen to the trajectories of satellites orbiting the Earth, she investigates ongoing and future processes of ‘xenomogrifications’ – the becoming of ...
Aug 29, 2024•57 min
In Louisiana, artist, activist, writer, and architectural researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown uncovers Black antebellum cemeteries – portals to recover and remember Afro-diasporic ecological praxes. Between 1820 and 1865, enslaved people were forced to clear Louisiana’s primordial forests to make way for the expansion of cane. They preserved small sections of forest where their loved ones were interred. These groves are both remnants of the erased bottomland hardwood forest and carefully stewarded...
Aug 23, 2024•43 min
Following lectures from scholars Astrida Neimanis and M Murphy at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024, both were joined on the Symposium stage by artist Sissel Marie Tonn for a conversation addressing many topics, from pollution and violence, to language, creative methods, and direct action. Guided by questions from the audience, they also address indigenous knowledge and research, discussing how to negotiate one's position within Western science and university systems, as well as direct action methods. 24...
Aug 16, 2024•55 min
Author and researcher Astrida Neimanis gives the opening lecture at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 Symposium. In a time of extinction and climate catastrophe, how are we to feel? Feeling intensifies, but also wavers. Feeling's temporal container pulses, its membrane now more porous: the past seeps in, the future jumps the gun. Feeling anything swims in the wake of what once was, and is burdened by what will or will not remain tomorrow. How do species-strangers care for and hold one another? What do we...
Aug 16, 2024•47 min
In this performative lecture, artist Juan Arturo García presents his research project about a nuclear reactor in Colombia. Radioactivity, earthquakes, and applications like geochronology are used as props to explore the paradoxes of trying to visualise inaccessible phenomena. García’s translation, or poetics of displacement, taps into the present cultural, mystical, and political consequences of technological deployments in Latin America. The lecture is followed by a Q&A session with Profess...
Aug 09, 2024•43 min
Filmmaker and researcher Solveig Qu Suess traces how water, infrastructure, and documentary film intertwine. Her lecture follows the flood pulse of Southeast Asia's main river – the Mekong – since the 1990s. Construction of hydroelectric dams has caused drastic changes, reconfiguring downstream landscapes to accommodate for the expansion of plantations. Instead of being governed by the seasons, Suess tells us that the river's rhythms are now dictated by the energetic demands of distant cities. A...
Jul 31, 2024•45 min
Researcher, educator, and curator Margarida Mendes ’ lecture asks how our understanding of the environment is shaped on different scales from the way we sense, to social protocols and intergovernmental infrastructures. For Mendes, a collective sense of our surroundings is formed by practices and policies that mould our ecological pedagogies and politics, giving space (or not) to future worlds. Through her work she transmits an ontology of the sensory, starting with her experiments in listening t...
Jul 31, 2024•56 min
In 1978, in the Dutch towns of Veghel and Almelo, two groups of migrant women from Turkey were involved in simultaneous labour disputes. They asked their employers for collective agreements, regular work hours, higher pay, and holiday time. The labour-intensive work of plucking chicken feathers in Almelo and peeling onions in Veghel has been lost in institutional archives – only traces of these historical moments remain. As belit sağ illuminates, the institutional archive guides the researcher t...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr
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, an...
Jul 15, 2024•53 min
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 i...
Jul 03, 2024•27 min
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...
Jun 20, 2024•39 min
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 nar...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 20 min
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’....
May 29, 2024•40 min
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 liqu...
May 09, 2024•34 min
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 g...
May 19, 2023•25 min
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 I...
May 19, 2023•25 min
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 res...
May 19, 2023•27 min
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 a...
Oct 27, 2022•31 min
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 a...
Oct 16, 2022•20 min
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...
Oct 16, 2022•21 min
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 inter...
Oct 16, 2022•21 min
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 pus...
Oct 16, 2022•13 min
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 ...
Oct 16, 2022•30 min
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. Tod...
Oct 16, 2022•30 min
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 build...
Oct 16, 2022•32 min
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...
Oct 16, 2022•30 min
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 t...
Oct 16, 2022•30 min
