Meeting point: Steklenik Gallery, park Tivoli
Duration: 45 minutes
Production: Zavod Cona
Part of the Acoustic Commons project.
To participate, send an email to info@cona.si.

The 8-channel sound composition (dis)solutions II reflects on proximity between bodies through water.

Our bodies are a myriad of things: constituting of equal amounts of human cells as various bacteria, and 70% is water, which is in constant exchange. Our cells change according to our surroundings. Looking at the quantum world, we might even exist at several places at once. We are not stable.

As quoted from Astrida Neimanis at the beginning of the sound piece: “Everyone both lives in and is a drain.” She writes: “We are all bodies of water […] As bodies of water, we leak and seethe, our borders always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation. It connects them to other worlds beyond our human selves. Indeed, bodies of water undo the idea that bodies are only human.”

Sound, both omnipresent and ephemeral, physical yet completely intangible, is potent for representing this complex mesh we surround ourselves with. It undulates through us, and some ricochets off our skin.

Composition comes from the word compore, meaning ‘to put together’. Our entangled ecology consists of (re)connections between a myriad of living and non-living things. (dis)solutions II contains sounds within and outside of our human sonic world and include field recordings, hydrophone, electromagnetic and ultrasound recordings.

Some of the sounds include deep sea hydrothermal vents (likely the cradle of life on earth), electromagnetic waves emitted by a computer built with raw materials from these vents, rowing on the Northern-Norwegian ocean, Ljubljana and Oslo, tectonic plates moving both cities on lava, Oslo underground sewer system, rains and rivers transporting water to mouths and guts, tubes blowing in the wind, an organ pulsating, tiny life in a pond and a racket under the sea.

We are in constant negotiation with other bodies, including through sound waves.
The composition aims to take the listener through this experience of meetings, from scales of the planetary to the watery and microscopic ones.