About
Cona connects contemporary arts with ecologies and places. The festival, concerts, sound walks, and reflective formats take place both at established partner venues and in parks, gardens, and other outdoor settings, where we foster awareness of respectful engagement with the beings and landscapes that inhabit them. Cona invites audiences into deep listening, sonic inquiry, and a distinctive narrative language.
Cona is a non-governmental organisation working across artistic and support activities that transdisciplinarily brings together music, sound, and performing arts with ecologies and places. Through its work, Cona cultivates the transformative potential of art in relation to the wider ecology of society, while also seeking to understand responsible care for the cultural field and its practitioners.
In the long term, the programme is dedicated to exploring sound, sonority, and music, and to developing listening tactics as an artistic, spatial, and social medium. It is grounded in an approach that brings ecological perspectives and environmental challenges into focus, and reflects on them through artistic practice and led by the position of acoustic ecology as a strategy for attuning to landscapes and for co-existing-with all involved actors, human and more-than-human alike. The programme brings interspecies relations into dialogue with the environment and offers a framework for thinking about ethical care as a creative, artistic practice.
Cona’s programme is recognisable in coherent thematic strands articulated as festivals and cycles (SO.UND.ING Acousmonium, the TO)pot festival, AnimotMUZIK), through the production of sound walks and sound-based exhibitions within the Steklenik project, and through education and publications. We understand these approaches as outgrowing traditional frameworks, learning from other fields as well as from nature and natural environments. We ask what landscapes can teach us, how to understand their dynamics in an inclusive way and to internalise them beyond capitalist and colonial logics, still deeply present in contemporary artistic production. In response, we work to develop new production models that foreground collaboration, process-based work, temporal cycles, openness to uncertainty, and attentive listening to one another.
Program Supporters
The Cona program is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City Municipality of Ljubljana, Department of Culture.
International Projects
International projects are supported by the Creative Europe programme and the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia.
Selected Projects
Selected projects are supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia from the Climate Change Fund of the Ministry of Environment, Climate and Energy of the Republic of Slovenia, as well as by the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund.
Selected Productions
Selected productions are supported by Cukrarna, Kino Šiška, the Museum of Architecture and Design, KD Cerknica / Notranjski Regional Park, Cankarjev Dom, the Ministry of Environment, Climate and Energy, and the Environmental Agency of the Republic of Slovenia.
Partners of Selected Productions
International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), Natural History Museum of Slovenia (PMS), Ljubljana Castle, Radio Slovenia’s 3rd Programme – Ars, Arboretum Volčji Potok, Bohinj Tourism, Ljudmila, Slovenian Ornithological Society (DOPPS), Škocjan Lagoon, Loški Museum Škofja Loka, Botanical Garden Ljubljana, Botanical Garden Maribor, Krater, Karter, Maska, Motovila.
Irena Pivka programme alchemist and collector of unusual ideas irena(at)cona.si
Matej Tomažin visual storyteller and hunter of fleeting perspectives matej(at)cona.si
Alja Petric chaos balancer and stabiliser of fluid processes alja(at)cona.si
Deva, Pika, and Florele more-than-human co-guides and well-being facilitator



