Cacophony Stories
Cacophony Stories
October 1 - 4, 2025
daadgalerie, Oranienstr. 161, 10969 Berlin
in English, free admission, all welcome
In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing tracks the deeply entangled and “patchy” realities of planetary co-existence, arguing for the importance of noticing the “disturbed ecologies” of capitalistic ruins. For Tsing, these are cacophonous realities full of “contaminated diversity” and that require a broader imagination as to how we may cultivate ways of surviving today. As she offers, “It is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.” In what ways might we listen to that cacophony of troubled stories? What do such stories reveal, and how does listening afford pathways toward precarious survival? As the cacophony seems to only expand and grow increasingly distorted within today’s troubled realities, what does cacophony itself say or mean?
Cacophony Stories invites ways of listening to cacophony, bringing attention to the troubled stories as well as the precarious methods and movements that search for ways of inhabiting disturbed ecologies and diverse social worlds. Structured around stories offered by invited guests, Cacophony Stories unfolds as an experimental workshop, where we’ll follow each story into a range of collective discussions, material modelings, and listening experiences. One story will open onto other stories, as we gather and share, threading individual concerns and practices into what Tsing emphasizes as the “encounter-based collaborations” so needed today.
Guest speakers and artists: Janine Natalya Clark, Dror Feiler, Golnoosh Heshmati, Masimba Hwati, Interspecifics, Brandon LaBelle, Okkyung Lee, Alexandra R. Toland.
Developed and organized in collaboration with DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program.
Program
October 1:
19:00 - 22:00
Brandon LaBelle, Opening Lecture: Silent Noise: Meditation on X
Dror Feiler: Performance
followed by a conversation between Brandon LaBelle and Dror Feiler
October 2:
14:00 - 18:00
Masimba Hwati, Chikwambo—Dark Mutant Cacophonies
presentation & workshop
October 3:
11:00 - 13:00
Alexandra R. Toland, Soil Stories: Sonic Meditations with Soil and Stones
presentation & workshop
14:30 - 17:30
Interspecifics, The Intelligence of Plants
screening & workshop
October 4:
11:00
Open discussion: collecting reflections, posing practices
12:00 - 13:30
Janine Natalya Clark, Thinking with Sound: Some Acoustic Experiences of the Russia-Ukraine War, presentation + conversation with Brandon LaBelle
14:30 - 17:30
Golnoosh Heshmati, What Is Left to Listen to Now? Collective ways of listening to an archive, presentation + workshop
19:30
Okkyung Lee: performance
More information:
Janine Natalya Clark is a professor of transitional justice at the University of Birmingham in the UK. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who has written four research monographs and more than 90 academic journal articles. She also enjoys creative writing. Her most recent research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focused on exploring the environmental impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war and their significance for how we think about and frame transitional justice.
Dror Feiler—musician, composer, visual artist, and political activist—has spent his life refusing to compromise. He has never seen art as entertainment. Indeed, his music itself is an act of confrontation. His entire body of work aims to destabilize the audience, to make them engage with sound, dig deep into it, experience all of its electric physicality, and bring their own unique experiences to the process. He refuses to create work that allows for passive listening, but he also eschews dictating meaning. Born in Tel Aviv in 1951, Feiler was one of the first Israeli refuseniks, declining to serve in the occupied Gaza Strip in 1970. He moved to Sweden in 1973 to study music and later renounced his Israeli citizenship to become a Swedish citizen. Despite leaving his homeland more than five decades ago, his complex relationship with Israeli politics has defined much of his life’s work and activism. He has never abandoned the vision and activism in which he was immersed while growing up in a socialistic kibbutz. In 2020, Feiler was one of the founders of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and he currently serves as chair of the Swedish organization Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.
Golnoosh Heshmati is an artist, researcher, and curator based between Rotterdam and Tehran. Her practice merges artistic and curatorial approaches, creating dialogues within the fragmented archives of everyday life through listening, text, sound, ceramics, and performance. She is the co-founder of Rabt (2020), a nomadic space dedicated to community engagement with a focus on sonic practices; co-facilitator of Khamoosh, an artistic research community that mediates conservation and restoration by exploring Iran’s sonic heritage; and a member of the GAPS curatorial collective. Recent collaborations include programs with Rewire Festival, the Nieuwe Instituut, Varia, the Listening Academy, and MaMA Rotterdam.
Masimba Hwati is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice weaves sculpture, sound, performance, micro-politics, and indigenous philosophy into experimental frameworks that explore everyday forms of resistance and negotiation. He holds a PhD in Art Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, an MFA from the University of Michigan, and a National Diploma in Fine Arts from Harare Polytechnic. Hwati was a 2025 Fellow at the Clark Art Institute (USA) and is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019, USA) and the Coady Institute, St. Francis Xavier University (Canada). He is also an honorary research fellow at Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa DSI/NRF South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI), Rhodes University, South Africa. His work is represented in major collections, including the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Jorge M. Pérez Collection (USA), Iziko South African National Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada), Manchester Contemporary (UK), and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. He has exhibited widely across Africa, Europe, and North America. Hwati’s publications include Der Seeteufel (2022) and Sokunge (As if) (2021). Sound projects include MShika-shika Guerilla poetics and the black market (2021), Deutschlandfunkultur. Lakenights-Tape (2019), Hwati-Collino (2020), and Soil, Root, Leaf (2025). His residencies include Skowhegan (USA), HUB BUB (USA), The Radio Art Residency in Weimar (Germany), and VIAD (South Africa, 2025).
Interspecifics is a transdisciplinary research studio whose practice touches upon artistic production, experimental pedagogy, and machine-making. Based in Mexico City, their work weaves together biology, artificial intelligence, and do-it-yourself electronics to explore new forms of communication and cognition. It is important to mention, however, that while their practice takes many shapes, sound remains a central thread—whether manifested in installations, live performances, net art, or AI-generated outputs. Their work is profoundly marked by the fluid materiality and aesthetics of sound. Since its founding in 2013 by Paloma López and Leslie García, the collective has pursued a research practice that brings attention to the agency and intelligence of non-human entities—from microorganisms and slime molds to plants, atmospheric currents, and beyond.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, educator, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: Communities in Movement (2019-23), The Pirate Academy (2021-22), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-21), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).
Okkyung Lee is a South Korean cellist, improviser, and composer. Lee moved to Boston in 1993, where she received a dual bachelor's degree in Contemporary Writing and Production and Film Scoring, and a master's degree in Contemporary Improvisation. Her music is absolute; unreserved and urgent. Whether you experience Okkyung Lee as a solo performer, in improvisational exchange with others, as a composer for contemporary music ensembles, as a sonic architect of site-specific works, or as a creator of playful synth melodies—you can always feel her inquisitive joy in experimentation and a crucial personal expression. “Noise + others”—this is how Okkyung Lee describes the work. Here, the term noise doesn’t refer to the specific music genre (whose penchant for repurposed sounds and occasionally extreme volumes she’s also fond of), but to the force with which noise goes deeper the surface of sounds. If you concentrate on just one thing for a long time, persistently digging deeper and deeper, then ideally something very personal will emerge, says Lee.
Alexandra R. Toland is Assistant Professor for Arts and Research at Bauhaus University Weimar, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Art and Design. She holds an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute and a doctorate in Landscape Planning from TU Berlin. She has published original and co-authored research in the Journal of Environmental Humanities, Urban Studies Journal, Journal of Performance Research, and edited the volume, Field to Palette – Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (2018). In her work as co-chair of the IUSS Commission on the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Soil Science she is currently co-editing a transdisciplinary handbook for soils research with Dr. Anna Krzywoszynska and a book on the “Soils Turn” in the arts with Patricia Watts. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art, the German Hygiene Museum, and Art Laboratory Berlin. With attention to soil as a slow-body and teacher, she uses mindful meditation, deep listening, violence-free communication, and multispecies ethnography in her artistic research practice.