Sonic Curiosities 6

📣 Sonic Curiosities 📣 is is back again with an afternoon and early evening of sound art at the beloved Villa Kuriosum.

With Sonic Curiosities VI we aim to challenge capitalist material relationships to objecthood, production, consumption and waste through a program which foregrounds radical re-use and transformation. Pushing back against value systems which privilege the new, precious, ‘innovative’ and unattainable, we strive to make old, existing and readily available things heard, felt, seen, composed, integrated and re-articulated.

🔊SOUNDING INSTALLATIONS AND SCULPTURES BY🔊

Cai Socias | Until Revolving

This work is born from the continuous action of hunt and collection of objects or “toys”. It is the search for this potentiality (which neglects the initial purpose of production) that creates certain intimacy with the items, and gives space for a reflection to be formulated. Then there is a procedure of manipulation of such materials: reshaping, destruction, reconstruction, reconnection, rearrangement, nursing. These materials get a new purpose, they are reactivated and re-animated through sound and movement.

Santiago Burreli | Fugue State

Concrete and fluorescent lighting permeate our culture as easily mass produced and functional materials which serve as the altar of industrialized efficiency. Santiago Burelli creates a sonified light sculpture that examines our interaction with and attraction to concrete and fluorescent lighting. Vía sonic and visual composition, the sculpture offers an abstraction from our daily use of these materials. Concrete and fluorescent lighting are pulled away from their routinely understood uses. The sculpture speculates at the fall of industry and acts as an invitation to heal in a purple glow.

Pedro Ferreira | Debris

The installation Debris (2021) is an on-going project that combines sound and discarded media found on the streets of Berlin, Germany, together with broken smartphones donated by individuals online as well as a browser-based game that can be played locally on a repurposed smartphone or online by scanning a QR-code. The assemblage becomes an autonomous device which interacts with the environment's light intensity in order to generate noise that gives expression to discarded media.
https://www.pedroferreira.net/

Lena Wenta | Stadtfarben

If one sees the sound corpus of the city as an organic structure, which constantly emits music that is mostly completely incomprehensible to humans, then the installation "Stadtfarben" represents a decoding apparatus, which filters out individual channels from the spectrum of this great music and makes it audible to humans on an understandable level in the form of raga music. The reproduction takes place over 13 electromagnetically excited tuning forks in chromatic tone gradation, which can be activated individually.
http://wenta.ws/

🧑‍🎤PERFORMANCES BY🧑‍🎤

Laure Boer

For Sonic Curiosities, Laure Boer will perform a live improvised performance with direct surrounding sound. All surrounding sounds, as well as custom made wind chimes and found objects are manipulated in real time. This performance is part of her current research on live improvised performance in direct reaction with the surrounding space and sound.

http://laureboer.com/
@laureboer

Ephemeral Autonomies

Ephemeral Autonomies moves in the triangle: sound, queer and bondage with a performance that is both visual and sonic.
In their premiere at Sonic Curiosities, the translation of gestures of consent and connection into sound, making the connection audible, is also a key to mental health specially in times of physical distance. The rope is a token of connection and opens a wider spectrum of intimacy.
Bondage as an archetype of non-mainstream non-genital-oriented eroticism has been a generous inspiration and a solid base for their creative work, even if not always free from being haunted by its own stereotypes and pitfalls, gender related but not only. They wish to celebrate it but also to deconstruct. Give queers some rope and they will tie and unravel themselves and the space around them.

🔧WORKSHOP BY🔧

Katharina Haverich and Christopher Böhm | “Zu verschenken”: MAKING SOUND ART FROM TRASH…and some stuff from your parents / Ebay / Modulor

Musician Christopher Hotti Böhm and performance artist Katharina Haverich will lead this 2.5 day workshop in building self-made sonic apparatuses, giving an insight into the development of their sonic performance art piece “he wolf / she man”. The workshop will strongly focus on the use of recycled materials in sound production, challenging capitalist material relationships to objecthood, production, consumption and waste.

We invite performers, sound artists, tinkerers, and/or people with an interest in circular economy, upcycling and recycling in the arts to apply.

⏰DATES AND TIMES⏰

SAT AUG 28 - 17 - 21h Presentation (optional)

📬 WORKSHOP APPLICATION 📬
Please send us a short video, audio recording or text (max. 60 seconds or 200 words of text) stating your name, your motivation to participate and 3 items you would like to bring to the workshop by 17.08.2021 at midnight. Don’t stress about this, we just want to get to know you! We can accomodate for a limited number of workshop participants and will let you know by 20.8 whether you will be able to participate.

"Please send all applications to soniccuriositiescollective@gmail.com

ℹ️More Informationℹ️

You can find more info on all our artists here:   soniccuriosities.com

😷 Hygiene 😷

Please bring negative test or proof of vaccination/recovery in order to attend. The event will be mainly held outside in the gorgeous sprawling community garden at the Villa Kuriosum. There will be access to installations inside with limited numbers of masked visitors at one time.

😯 About Sonic Curiosities 😯

Sonic Curiosities Collective formed in 2019 from a small group of sonic artists with the aim of growing, celebrating, and supporting the sound-art community. We invite makers, performers, and artists to share ideas and showcase work in a space that challenges the dominance of ‘white cube’ exhibition contexts. Our regular sound art events are hosted at Villa Kuriosum - a ramshackle underground venue and community space in the middle of a sprawling community garden in Berlin Friedrichshain. Its spaces are filled with material curiosities, from taxidermy animals to aged musical instruments, and jars of preserved biological oddities.

This event has been made possible with the generous support of the Music Board Berlin