Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care - Live Program
ACOUSTIC JUSTICE, ACOUSTIC CARE - LIVE PROGRAM / ERRANT SOUND, GERICHTSTR. 45, 13347 BERLIN
PROGRAM NOTES
JULY 10 / 20:00
Manuela García Aldana AKA Amuleto Manuela
On Circular Listening
On Circular Listening is a lecture performance that explores how we might meet and listen to one another beyond hierarchies, modern categories, and colonial modes of perception. Inspired by circular practices of gathering and listening, such as the Circle of Words of Indigenous communities in Colombia, the Rueda de Cumbia, and the Roda de Samba, the project reimagines listening as a collective and immersive experience. Through sound, rhythm, orality, and deep listening, the performance reflects on how colonial structures continue to shape the ways we relate to each other, produce knowledge, and inhabit the world. In contrast to vertical models embodied by stages, institutions, and systems of representation, it proposes a circular space where different temporalities, memories, and epistemologies can coexist without seeking synthesis or consensus. On Circular Listening opens a space for listening to the world's diversity from within, rather than from a distant vantage point. By understanding sound as a carrier of knowledge, memory, and transformation, the lecture performance asks: how can we heal the way we listen to one another?
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Manuela García Aldana, AKA Amuleto Manuela, is a sound artist, DJ and curator based in Berlin. Working across dance floors, art institutions, and listening environments, her practice weaves together sound sculpture, immersive soundscapes, collective listening sessions, and genre-defying DJ sets. Born in what is now known as Colombia, she explores sound as a medium for unlearning, remembering, and reimagining how we inhabit our collective life experience.She hosts the monthly show Music Shrine on Refuge Worldwide, is a researcher and curator at SAVVY Contemporary and teaches at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin (MA Raumstrategien). Amuleto Manuela’s work has been featured internationally at institutions and festivals including Kunsthaus Dahlem, Brücke-Museum, Ultima Festival (Oslo), Real Jardín Botánico (Madrid), the Listening Biennial at Errant Sound, the Venice Biennale, and the 13th Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography in Mali. As a DJ, she’s performed at celebrated festivals such as Fusion, Garbicz, Melt, between others, and played at Berlin clubs including Sisyphos, Kater Blau, YAAM, Klunkerkranich, Arkaoda, and Sameheads. Her international sets have reached audiences in Bogotá , São Paulo, Barranquilla, Oslo.
Yuri Tuma
Interspecies Communication and Technologies of Misunderstanding
To truly engage in interspecies communication, we must begin by dismantling, as much as possible, the human/animal binary. An anthropocentric approach to this type of exchange inherently creates questionable hierarchies. Field recording and the use of artificial intelligence can help us examine how listening technologies intersect with issues of digital ethics, ecotourism, and consumer behavior. To delve deeper into these questions, this sensorial presentation will explore our relationship to a well-known singer in the human imaginary: the whale. Cetacean communication, its recording and algorithmic analysis bring into focus the contemporary conditions under which human technologies extract, translate, and circulate sounds produced by other species, often without any possibility of consent. What listening practices might foster more symmetrical modes of interspecies communication, unbound by political, legal, or biological hierarchies? What new forms of scientific care can flourish within these technological possibilities? And what new relational modes might we dream into being between song-maker and listener, human or nonhuman?
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Yuri Tuma is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist living in Madrid, where he co-founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies and practices as its Academic and Artistic Co-Director. Yuri’s work focuses on investigating contemporary narratives related to sonic and queer ecologies through collective practice, active listening, sound art, installation, and performance. In early 2020, he co-founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) in Madrid, a platform for critical thought and a collaborative network of artists, researchers, curators, and thinkers engaged with the complexities of the ecological crisis. Within IPS, he also actively shapes the editorial route of Cthulhu Books, an editorial platform to showcase the political potential of imagining new worlds and possible stories for the planet through academic and artistic research.
~pes (Elizabeth Gallón Droste / Pablo Torres Gómez)
I Build My Language with Rocks
I Build My Language with Rocks is a sonic performance by pes: laboratory for animal dreams (Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Pablo Torres Gómez) in which rocks and earthly elements become portals of listening. Through friction and resonance, the performance invites audiences to cultivate an expanded acoustic imagination attuning to the deep vibrations of earth, where language is not spoken but trembled into being.
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~pes is a collaborative artistic research process between bogotá-born and berlin-based elizabeth gallón droste and pablo torres gómez. Through site-specific investigation, ~pes evokes multimodal encounters with the interspecific weave we are part of, enacting partial encounters with divergent temporalities and beings in processes of becoming. The process questions and exceeds conventional, close-ended representations of planetary ecologies, fostering attunements to the murmurous and subterranean worlds that constitute them. These collective encounters and imaginative processes take the form of sound walks, listening sessions, installations, written texts and sonic releases.
( ether o ) Chia-Liang Lai
Sound of melting glacier
The set is based on field recordings of melting glaciers. The sound traces a landscape in reverse—the undoing of formation through decomposition, drifting, bubbling, flowing, and grieving. Conceived as a ritual, it invites listeners to attune to planetary sensitivity and practices of care through sound.
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( ether o ) Chia-Liang Lai is an interdisciplinary artist and Reiki practitioner whose work centers on frequency, sound and listening as methods for exploring embodied cosmologies and storytelling where care, repair and collective imagination become tools for worldbuilding. They work across various media, including sound, video, installation, performance, music production, and DJing.
JULY 11 / 20:00
Marie Yevkiné Tirard
Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic
Marie found a book of poems that her maternal great-grandmother Yevkiné Diarian, survivor of the Armenian Genocide, wrote in the 1930s, which was conserved in her family as a sort of silent relic. She decided to translate these poems and discovered all the emotions of nostalgia that Yevkiné could never express during her lifetime. In order to give a voice to her ancestor, Marie creates music from her words. Embodying the figure of the ashugh, a nomadic troubadour who mixed poetry, narration, and music, she tells the stories of her ancestors. She plays the saz, the instrument of the troubadour, combining it with electronics and recordings of ambient sounds and traditional instruments.
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Marie Yevkiné Tirard is a multimedia artist, vocalist and composer, fascinated by phenomena of emotional resonance. Her work aims to enchant in a poetical way, in order to reconstruct lost listening relationships, threatened knowledges and non-western musical improvisation practices. She reflects on themes such as collective memory, ancestral heritage, and the political importance of intimate archives.
Hui Ye
Songs of Oblivion: Prelude
Songs of Oblivion is a long-term project by Hui Ye that explores the auditory dimensions of history and collective memory across various media, including moving image and spatial sound installation. Initiated through research into the traditional singing practice of the Tao people, an Indigenous community native to Lanyu Island in Taiwan, the project also confronts the island’s complex political history under post-war Taiwanese military administration. In Songs of Oblivion: Prelude (two-channel video installation, 2019–2026), the artist focuses on the history of the former Lanyu Farm (1958–1990), a network of correctional labor camps established across the island. Drawing from oral testimonies and personal memories of local community witnesses, the work traces recurring sonic fragments embedded in individual recollections of this period, reconstructing traces of political violence and social rupture that remain largely silenced within dominant historical narratives. Bringing together voices, stories, and auditory memories, the project reflects on the transformative and political power of singing and listening, while questioning how histories are continuously reshaped and remembered through sound.
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Hui Ye (b. Canton, China) is an artist and composer based in Vienna. She studied Composition and Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (2004–2011), and Digital Arts and TransArts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2010–2018). Working across video, sound installation, and sonic composition, her artistic practice explores the intersections of sound, history, and identity. Central to her work is listening—understood as a political, social, and emotional act that shapes both collective and individual experience. Her recent research focuses on the voice and its diverse forms of vocalisation, ranging from human and machinic speech to spiritual practices such as chanting and mediumistic channelling. Ye investigates how aural memory and sonic expression operate as agents of self-articulation, reflection, and the reclamation of histories marginalized by institutional narratives. Hui Ye is co-founder of Mai Ling, a queer-feminist collective of Asian artists, and a member of Vienna Secession. Her works have been recently presented at the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Manifesta 15 Barcelona (with radio SLUMBER), Kunsthalle Wien, Belvedere 21 Vienna, Jim Thompson Art Center Bangkok, Lothringer 13 Halle Munich, Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Shanghai, and the Times Museum Guangzhou, China.
Nunzia Picciallo
tuning presence
This act enters the public space as a minimal intervention: a practice without narrative or spectacle. Its intention is to generate a temporary field of shared awareness, where everyday sounds, and silences come into focus. Through sustained attention, the body functions as a tuning device. It invites a recalibration of perception, expanding listening to include the environment in its entirety. The body remains a point of concentration through which the surrounding world becomes audible. Presence gives rise to listening, creating a space of potential vibration, and collective attention.
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Nunzia Picciallo is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, performer, facilitator active in international contexts. They develop an artistic practice that investigates the power structures that permeate corporeality and subjectivity, activating the body as a political device for analysis, deconstruction, and transformation. With a transdisciplinary approach, their practice and work moves amongst performance, dance, visual arts, and sound, generating a critical perspective beyond representation. Nunzia’s creations have been presented across various spaces and festivals in Europe, Asia, Central and North America, receiving various awards and recognitions. In parallel with their artistic work, Nunzia is engaged in facilitation and pedagogy, leading movement workshops that bring together dance professionals and individuals from diverse backgrounds and abilities both for institutional context and underground independent community spaces.
Anja Kreysing
Segment 19 - FLUME
Segment 19 – FLUME originates from a field recording made inside the concrete tube of a fish pass, where water striking the walls produces a narrow resonance between A and B♭. This unstable microtonal field becomes the structural centre of the work. Granular and spectral processes, sine tones, and slowly drifting accordion drones performed on two slightly detuned instruments reorganise the recording into an evolving acoustic space. Derived from satellite views of the landscape, the video gradually collapses from a distant, cartographic perspective into the narrow concrete passage of a fish ladder. The work asks what it means to listen within an environment whose natural dynamics have largely been replaced by technical regulation. Rather than representing fish directly, the piece attempts to listen from within the conditions they inhabit: a denaturalised habitat shaped by dams, channels, and engineered flow. The microtonal resonance discovered inside the fish passage became a way of attending to life persisting within these constraints. Listening here becomes an act of care, an acknowledgement of beings negotiating altered environments that remain largely unheard.
Segment 19 - FLUME is a composition commissioned for Flow. Flow is a creative exploration of the river Lech, telling the story of a river through sound Past, present, and future flow together as artists transform field recordings, research and satellite images into a recomposed interpretation of the life of a river. The river’s story, reimagined in sound. Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
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Anja Kreysing is a post-cinematic composer whose work explores listening as a cinematic act. Combining accordion, electronics, field recordings, and layered video, she creates audiovisual environments that move between expanded cinema, installation, and live performance. Her electroacoustic- and real-time compositions investigate landscapes and architectures as sonic micro-geographies where perception itself becomes the central dramaturgy. She performs internationally and co-curates the label schwarz-weiss ist die bessere farbe, dedicated to performative expanded cinema. Kreysing is a Certified Deep Listening® Practitioner and an active collaborator in interdisciplinary and media-based projects that expand the field of cinematic listening.
JULY 12 / 19:30
Hanna Grześkiewicz / Yasemin Keskintepe
Burning Silence
How to listen to a world on fire? Burning Silence is a participatory session by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Yasemin Keskintepe that extends their recent symposium. Taking “burning” as both material event and political condition — from wildfire, extraction, militarised violence, to the affective intensities of grief, anger, or refusal —the session asks under what conditions such forms of burning become audible, what obstructs or distorts their audibility, and how silences demand for other forms of listening. Working with a large paper surface as a shared acoustic field, participants are invited to map different forms of burning and the conditions through which they may become heard. The session explores modalities of listening by gathering approaches and practices, tracing their resonances, and tensions, that emerge between different forms of burning and silence.
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Hanna Grześkiewicz is a curator, researcher and artist whose work explores the intersections of sound, social movements, feminist thought, and border politics. She works across participatory and public discourse formats, performance, sound installations, writing, and radio work. As an organiser, she supports internationalist solidarity-building between feminist activists, and is currently the Programme Director at filia.die frauenstiftung.
Yasemin Keskintepe is a curator and researcher exploring the politics and poetics of digital media. Her work attends to how technologies mediate relations between bodies, environments, and infrastructures, tracing the material ecologies and affective intensities that shape contemporary life. She is interested in artistic practices that intervene in networked systems, making visible both their extractive logics and their potential for collective reimagining. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam and researcher at Humboldt University’s The Technical Image.
James Hazel
listening through precarity
Two pieces for an antipodean working-class voice (2026)
text, voice, sine-tones, car motor field-recordings
- lumpen-field
- burnout (again)
Monophthongisation. Spectral nasality. Itching for some-place to go. Stalled time (again).
Prompt for a Pre(care)ious Score no. 1 (nodes of affinity) (2023)
A collective participatory performance for anyone, led by a single speaker within a circle of participants. A polyphony at the impasse.
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James Hazel (jameshazel.net) is a composer, artist, and researcher currently based on unceded Gadigal Land (so-called Sydney). Moving across video, text, language, voice, and sound, his practice explores how score-based and listening forms can render the hauntological, classed, and temporal conditions of late capitalism audible. In this respect, Hazel’s work treats listening as a site of radical sociological praxis. James is the founder of POOR OPERA, a project that creates precarious operas, facilitates community workshops, produces publications, and builds support networks for working- and under-class artists. James’ work has been presented through Liquid Architecture, Gaudeamus Festival; Ensemble Mise-en (New York; The World Acoustic Ecology Forum; STEGI Radio (Athens), and Cashmere Radio (Berlin) to name a few. From 2023-2024 he was an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris).
Max Bloching
Ground Practice (2026, 16 mins)
A former military training ground on the outskirts of Berlin lies quiet. Used in turn by Prussian, Nazi, and Soviet forces, the area, contaminated by decades of munitions, is slowly being reclaimed by wolves, wind turbines, and conservationists. Layering archival and newly shot material, Ground Practice traces the echoes of a militant past to attend to the dreams, fears, and futures being rehearsed on this contested ground today.
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Max Bloching (b. 1994) is an artist-filmmaker, composer, and sound designer whose work spans cinema, theatre, and visual art. His films have screened internationally at Visions du Réel, RAI Film Festival, APT Gallery London, and Berwick Media Arts Festival. As a composer and sound designer, he has worked with artists including James Richards, Tolia Astakhishvili, Bethan Hughes, and Ludivine Large-Bessette on shows at Hamburger Bahnhof, SculptureCenter New York, Fluentum Berlin, and mumok Vienna. Max holds a BA in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, and an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Marialuisa Capurso
Some traces of Rubedo
Some Traces of Rubedo is a sound composition made from fragments collected throughout six years of the participatory research project Rubedo. Voices, interviews, poems, sounds.
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Marialuisa Capurso is a singer, performer, and researcher working in the fields of voice, movement, sound, and body art. Her practice combines performance, sound installation, participatory art, and collective research processes. She facilitates spaces for socially engaged artistic practices, develops sound installations, and leads research groups focused on body, breath, and voice exploration. She continues her training and research through somatic practices, body–mind approaches, and craniosacral disciplines, integrating these perspectives into her artistic, performative, and pedagogical practice.