Cona events source

As great as children’s happiness is, children’s sadness is also deep. Full of questions. Deep, painful, important.

In the forest amongst moss and dreams, rabbits and ferns have made a bet, which is why they have found themselves in full preparations for a very special Olympics. The sporting event between the squabbling forest creatures who stopped talking to each other, is framed by the story of two best friends, Lara and Igor, who, as all friends sometimes do, fell out one day. Through a series of humorous twists, hurdles and with a strong desire to win, which is overcome by friendship and joy, a space opens up for a range of emotions that accompany the painful clash between a girl and a boy.

The play is designed as a soundwalk for children and their parents. When the children run into the forest together with the actors, the ambiance of the real space and the play start intertwining. By listening, moving around the space, and exploring small art installations, children and parents, together with the actors, immerse themselves in the action, thus becoming part of the story revolving around a very special competition in the forest…

Earthling Gaia is a performance which through sound, walking and the inclusion of space aims at the sensibilization of young people and the promotion of outdoor activities. In addition to experiencing and reflecting on the ecology, it prompts the development of mindfulness.

From an indoor site, such as a theatre, cinema or gallery, the performance invites us outdoors, in the nature. A forest as a stage, and the audience trading comfortable chairs for walking shoes and heading off to the performance.

Some locations along the way are natural venues – natural auditoriums complete with architecturally superb observations posts, offering magnificent views of the landscape which intoxicates with its beauty and triggers imagination by constantly changing. We can imagine looking into the future, exploring possible scenarios for the days to come.

A dystopian story of Earthling Gaia recounts a possible future of the Lake Cerknica area. We experience the sound performance while walking a selected part of the Drvošec trail. We stop at the observation posts, observe the lake, experience the forest and, above all, listen. Earthling Gaia, a girl as a metaphor and the main character of the performance, will speculate on a potential scenario of the future of our overstrained planet which indisputably dictates the development of the local landscape.

The soundwalk Odjek strela is an artistic research that uses guided listening to open questions of memory, archiving and silence within the urban space. The listening session stems from years of researching the relationship between documentation and forgetting. The walk is based on the layering of sound materials – archival recordings, text fragments, field recordings and contemporary sound interventions – that are intertwined with sounds taken from the immediate surroundings. This establishes a tension between the mediated and the directly experienced, the written and the elusive. The central motif of the soundwalk is the echo of a gunshot – a sound that returns, moves away and comes closer, as a point of orientation and as a disturbance. It refers to the former symbol of the pink gun on the facade of the former Rog factory and opens questions linked to the history of the space: from industrial production to autonomous practices, erasure and transformation. What happens to the story when the gun is not fired? The author treats the lack of the gunshot as silence – an active and meaningful absence. The soundscape shifts between the echoes of live radio transmissions emitted from the roof of the former factory building and low-frequency pulses in its basement, which act almost physically, like a subterranean recording. The path leads through the urban space as through an invisible archive, in which layered histories and repressed memories are revealed. Speculative questions are raised: what would the trees remember if they were still standing, and what traces do the new trees extract from the soil? The conclusion at the former Rog factory, at the monument to the erased, establishes a temporary, invisible monument – a space of reflection on what remains unspoken but persistently present.

As great as children’s happiness is, children’s sadness is also deep. Full of questions. Deep, painful, important.

In the forest amongst moss and dreams, rabbits and ferns have made a bet, which is why they have found themselves in full preparations for a very special Olympics. The sporting event between the squabbling forest creatures who stopped talking to each other, is framed by the story of two best friends, Lara and Igor, who, as all friends sometimes do, fell out one day. Through a series of humorous twists, hurdles and with a strong desire to win, which is overcome by friendship and joy, a space opens up for a range of emotions that accompany the painful clash between a girl and a boy.

The play is designed as a soundwalk for children and their parents. When the children run into the forest together with the actors, the ambiance of the real space and the play start intertwining. By listening, moving around the space, and exploring small art installations, children and parents, together with the actors, immerse themselves in the action, thus becoming part of the story revolving around a very special competition in the forest…

The bioacoustic sound sculpture Inaudible – Audible, among the Bats reveals an almost inaudible world of frequency ranges emitted by bats that are usually inaccessible to humans. The project is positioned between sound ecology and bioacoustic music, as it processes the sounds of the night environment and bats from the ultrasonic spectrum and transposes them into the human audible range.

The composition consists of audible night sounds, joined by transposed bat voices and other nocturnal sound sources. The final sound space consists of an inner – castle, distant forest and central space, represented by the external platform surrounding the castle. The composition includes electroacoustic processing of the sound material and is played as a spatial, 3D or 360-degree sound projection.

Reverse walking, or rather backwards walking, turns our attention back to front. It slows us down. It relaxes us over time. Not only does the speed of our walk slow down, but also the perception of what we are walking past and what is coming towards us.

As we, through backwards walking, move away from the landscape, the landscape comes closer to us. A space of attention opens, and it is from this reversed position that we surrender to listening.

The artistic practice of backwards walking also reverses the roles in the performance. Mathilde and DISKOlektiv no longer assume the role of performers, instead they adopt the role of spectators. The rest of us join them as the spectators and listeners of the greatest spectacle in the world: life. How does life hear us?

We would like to invite you to a collective backwards walking session under the full moon, at the transition from day to night, in a circle, cyclically, elliptically.

You will need comfortable clothing and footwear to walk backwards. While walking backwards, you will also be able to walk forwards or stomachwards. Walking is suitable for people of all physical abilities.

Voice shapes unique compositions with the complex musical instrument of our bodies every day. A unique composition that follows the individual’s paths is created through the multi-layered structure of predominantly improvised responses to the numerous stimuli to which we are exposed daily and situationally.

The voice, even when not expressed, resides in the inner silence of an individual, thus forming a living entity in which continuous communication between multiple sub-personalities takes place. Only through a conscious decision does it become audible, flexibly transitioning between different roles: communication, warning, messaging, expression of power, creation, social networking, calming or a therapeutic tool.

The GLASnaPOT soundwalk takes us gradually from the loud city streets to inner landscapes – on a journey during which we get to know the musical instrument that we inhabit, inviting us to curiously explore all its hidden corners.

Ljubljana is increasingly losing touch with its cultural identity, the essential component of which is also the city’s architecture. It is crucial to keep this component alive, fostering a personal connection between people and their history.

Green Atrium of the City is a sonic exploration of an abandoned space in the middle of the city, where a green landscape is growing. A soundwalk combining art and architecture draws inspiration from a historic building designed by Jože Plečnik, begun in 1925, weaving memories of the past into the present. The Central Stadium in Bežigrad has been closed to the public since 2008. Once a public space, it is now falling into disrepair, its significance increasingly waning. Through sonority and historicization, we want to bring the inhabitants and visitors of Ljubljana closer to the degraded space of the stadium, which has been distorted from different angles by the decay of time. In its silent decay, the stadium is suspended in a timeless void, inviting ideas for its revival. Echoes of falling debris, sticks, branches, and glass scratch the texture of the air, reminding us of a once vibrant place.

The soundwalk acts as a musical intervention, breathing temporary meaning into Plečnik Stadium and reviving its resonant core. It prompts deep reflection on the preservation of cultural heritage and foregrounds the more sensory perception of space. The soundwalk focuses on the complex sound structure and acoustic characteristics of Plečnik Stadium and its environment, which, with its resonant body, acts as an instrument – the stadium not only as a space but as a live sonic entity.

The bioacoustic sound sculpture Inaudible – Audible, among the Bats reveals an almost inaudible world of frequency ranges emitted by bats that are usually inaccessible to humans. The project is positioned between sound ecology and bioacoustic music, as it processes the sounds of the night environment and bats from the ultrasonic spectrum and transposes them into the human audible range.

The composition consists of audible night sounds, joined by transposed bat voices and other nocturnal sound sources. The final sound space consists of an inner – castle, distant forest and central space, represented by the external platform surrounding the castle. The composition includes electroacoustic processing of the sound material and is played as a spatial, 3D or 360-degree sound projection.

The sound walk addresses Ljubljana’s underpasses, largely abandoned areas, reveal the city’s inability to imagine new urban uses and meanings. Neglected underpasses beneath the paving stones of orderly streets and squares are becoming shelters for those unheard on the margins of society.

The author listens closely to the Ajdovščina underpass. Through real-time sound capture and processing, everyday noises, silences, footsteps and echoes are transformed into an immersive sonic experience that opens up a space for what has been left unspoken. It reveals moments of unexpected beauty and places the listener in relation to space as a living, multilayered organism of unheard realities.

The Ajdovščina underpass, built on the site of a former Emona cemetery, carries deeper historical layers. Walking through these underground corridors becomes a movement through the temporalities of the city, where life, death, memory and forgetting intertwine.

Pod(hod) is conceived as a collection of associations from a day in the lives of individuals on the margins of society. The titles of the sound segments, Tunings, Silent Prayers, Gatherings of the Found, Walk of Shame, Lives Before Shop Windows, Lullaby, Morning Again and A Fragile Confrontation with Reality, do not interpret these lives, but create a space of listening in which a sensitive, open relationship to the other and to the world can emerge.

The world holds you, like it or not.
It moves you with fire and wind when it’s hot.
You’re chasing your sleep and wasting your spot —
you better start living.
The world has you turning the dirt, unforgiving,
old gravity is pulling — but love, oh love,
the night that embraced you unraveled the night.

Tu, čisto blizu is an invitation for participants to transform from passive walkers into active co-creators of the urban landscape, leaving behind a more visible imprint, a more visible trace.

On the level of both the individual and the group, the walk explores how we inhabit and move through the city, and what defines the nature of our encounters and interactions. It foregrounds the bodily dimension of experiencing the city and asks how the body might be placed within the predictable dynamics of urban life in a different way. It highlights the power of the moment when individuals step out of individualistic, fleeting observation of their surroundings and become aware of, give meaning to, and perhaps even alter their automated urban routes.

Through different situations and stops in the city, Tu, čisto blizu invites participants to walk through the city in a playful and liberated way, and to actively situate themselves within it.

Seven scores for situated listening. Exercises in perception for deep listening.

Nadiža River. Older than Mountain Eocene. Fossilised Glow Kipos. Geomagnetic Waves Panagia Mantala. Tree above River Pohorje primeval Forest. Resonant Echoes of Medusa Vesuvius. In(Out)-Breath Luna. Almost Audible

Exercises in perception are conceived as a series of poetic scores for whole-body listening. They take as their point of departure seven spaces and their dominant elements, which form the central cores of aural immersion. The performative nature of the poetic instructions foregrounds embodied perception and different modes of sensing, gravitating towards the revelation of deeper fields of perception. The exploration unfolds across three modular clusters: gaze – looking – distance /// cells – skin – hearing /// touch – texture – resonance. Participants will enact the exercises in perception within the dynamic between individual and community.

Participants will be offered poetic instructions for shaping minimal movements and performative formations in space, leading them into processes of expanded perception and attentive listening to particular sonorities. Through heightened sensory receptivity, we become aware of expanded, ecstatic modes of perception and reawaken a sense of different temporalities. The process attunes us to the elements.

The bioacoustic sound sculpture Inaudible – Audible, among the Bats reveals an almost inaudible world of frequency ranges emitted by bats that are usually inaccessible to humans. The project is positioned between sound ecology and bioacoustic music, as it processes the sounds of the night environment and bats from the ultrasonic spectrum and transposes them into the human audible range.

The composition consists of audible night sounds, joined by transposed bat voices and other nocturnal sound sources. The final sound space consists of an inner – castle, distant forest and central space, represented by the external platform surrounding the castle. The composition includes electroacoustic processing of the sound material and is played as a spatial, 3D or 360-degree sound projection.

Concert for geomantic instruments, sound-bearing stones, archaeological artifacts, field sound recordings, a feedback loop, a sound synthesizer, movement/voice.

The composition is based on the question of how to play space, on sonic autochthonism (; from the earth itself) and on the sonic research of prehistoric spaces and sanctuaries in the Pohorje primeval forest, northern Greece (the Greek island of Samothrace and the Pangaion hills) and Vesuvius. The performative composition synthesizes the sensuality of movement and the archetypal musicality of concrete littoral materiality. It is based on cyclicity, circulation, rubbing, oscillation, the creation of geomantic instruments and sequences of performative field recordings (tied to specific spaces, elemental and archaeological artifacts).

Shrines create, receive, and emit a subtle field that carries profound transformative meaning throughout human culture. The mycelium of the territory is intertwined with natural and manmade shrines, in which the ancient ways of connecting, worshiping, and harmonizing human existence with nature and the transcendent continue resonating even today.

The central parameters of the musical structure are the modalities of movements performed by the artist with geomantic instruments. By circulating the sound signal through the vibration-magnetic circuit of geomantic instruments, microphones and analogue-digital environment, the artist controls the microtonal sound field, elemental melody, fragments of the archetypal rhythm and the axes of asynchronous harmony. The process pursues the psychoacoustics of matter and form.

Littoral matter is not a solitary silent substance, but a networked, crystalline resonance – a musical field full of movement and cosmic connections.

The Angstmachine[1] is a series of electroacoustic, quadraphonic compositions for a custom-made friction idiophone of the same name. The sonic material interweaves atmospheric field recordings with friction, oscillations, resonances, and restrained electronic processing. The composition unfolds as a layering of sound, in which performative gestures (strikes, slides, pressures, bowing, spins, and rotations) are transferred into the instrument, generating sensations of unrest, tension, and the foreboding of an approaching collapse. The instrument, tuned to 31EDO, is simultaneously plucked, struck, and played with a bow; it produces pulsations, reverberations, and rhythms, along with unusual sonic landscapes. The electronics act as a quiet extension of the instrument, through decay, modulated feedback loops, spring reverb, and seemingly random movement through the quadraphonic space, with real-time gestures taking the lead role. Through tiny frictions, muffled resonance, and sonic implosions, the artist creates an acoustic metaphor for social anxiety. What begs the question is what kind of poetry can be made during a time of war? The first composition in the series, The Calm Before the Storm, establishes a quiet state of anxiety, ranging from subdued tension to ominous sonic shadows (unease, apprehension, tension, sinister omen, torment). The Angstmachine is a sonic ritual that, through the fissures between the acoustic and the electronic, reveals the unrest of the contemporary world and invites listeners to confront its echo.

[1] Angstmachine is a custom-made instrument that combines elements of the Apprehension Engine, a hybrid acoustic instrument by Canadian film composer Mark Korven, the daxophone, an electroacoustic wooden experimental string instrument invented by Hans Reichel, and Resonant Garden, a modular electroacoustic instrument by Folktek.

A series of continuous bursts of high-energy sound particles pulsate through frequency and time fields, slicing space into layers. It is no longer a single attack or glitch, but a systematic planning of a series of events and the devastation that follows – a slow, relentless devastation that seeks not a goal, but a state. Orchestrated Attack is a utopian reflection on the echo of informational, financial, social, moral-ethical and personal chaos, the disintegration of civilizational values and rules, in which systems do not collapse in an explosion, but disintegrate in the background, in silence, supported by invisible flows of interests and power. Capital directs the hand, the algorithm seeks the goal and directs the gaze, and the weapon merely completes the sentence that was written long ago.

Pain and loss conjure the morning of searching eyes, not eyes of comfort or hope, but eyes that count losses in absence. They evoke the imperceptible movement through the ruins under drones, where laser-guided metal objects not only extinguish the light, but transform it into eternal darkness.

In a small place where the coast and the sea meet, a woman walks on the warm sand. She walks towards the sea, holding a baby in her arms. In the dark night, the baby’s cry sounds louder. A tear that falls into the sea echoes in the emptiness of the night. Where the sea and the sky meet, infinity begins.

The soundwalk Ad somnum is based on a radio play of the same name. While developing the soundwalk, the creators explored the power of sound contemplation, which leads the listener into an intimate, yet raw grip of postpartum depression experienced by the main protagonist of the story.

The sound is created by intertwining breathing, the rippling of water, and a human voice. Inhalation creates tension, momentum, a moment of introspection, which is released through the wave of exhalation. The deeper the inhalation, the more powerful the wave of songs and words becomes. The motifs taken from the Slovenian folk song A Girl Went to Fetch Water with the principle of loading and removal and the nature of the voice that is created through exhalation, direct the sound flow on which the story sails through three female voices. Factual data penetrates the subtle fabric of the narrative and confession, creating a contrast between subjective experience and objective reality.

In this peripatetic lecture, we will encounter intentionality. This is a fundamental characteristic of our ability to think, in which we can only think about something and never about nothing. The same applies to the experience of sound: we can only experience sound and not silence. Just as humans are incapable of not thinking, we are also incapable of experiencing silence.

As a starting point, I will use my old definition of music as non-verbal sound games. It is non-verbal because it reaches into all areas of our experience: pre-symbolic, symbolic (linguistic) and post-symbolic. It is sonorous because music is sound, no matter how much we strive to feel the silence within. And it is a game because it is based on rules even in its freest forms. It is not only playful, but it is a game, it is not merely playing, its essence and core, which dictates its outcome whenever it begins.

I will conduct the peripatetic lecture in improvisation revolving around rhythm. I will explain Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis as a special field of understanding human life, similar to psychoanalysis. The fundamental question of the lecture will be whether Lefebvre discovered a rhythmic equivalent of the unconscious that is in its essence beyond space and time.

Therefore, while walking, we will walk from silence to resonation, from silence to noise, from silence to sound, from silence to tone, from pause to beat, from the measure of silence to rhythm, and finally from silence to space-time. The singular experience of soundsilence here and now will open a moment of eternity. We will end in Hegel’s infinite judgment at the end of dialectics, beyond Aufheben and Aufgehoben.

REPAST is a shared lunch for artists and visitors to the TO)pot festival. It is conceived as a space for gathering, taking a break, and informally engaging with the ideas and themes explored through the work of Cona and the TO)pot festival.

The BAZA space welcomes visitors with a soundscape featuring compositions from the Cona archive, alongside a selection of books, specialist publications, and booklets from the archive of Cona’s projects.

REPAST is a shared lunch for artists and visitors to the TO)pot festival. It is conceived as a space for gathering, taking a break, and informally engaging with the ideas and themes explored through the work of Cona and the TO)pot festival.

The BAZA space welcomes visitors with a soundscape featuring compositions from the Cona archive, alongside a selection of books, specialist publications, and booklets from the archive of Cona’s projects.

The lecturer will reflect on the reasons and meanings of silence within the ARIS project Ethnography of Silence(s) – on the example of ethnographic research of the Istrian exodus, the national “hero“ and beliefs. In this research, silence is considered a consequence of socio-political power relations, or to be more precise, the relationship between the memories of dominant and marginalized social groups. Silence occurs when memory cannot rely on collective memory, because this is censored due to a different view of the past. Another key cause of silence is connected to the Freudian ideas of repression, in which traumatic memories are buried in our subconscious in order to protect ourselves from reliving the pain from the past. Silence can also arise from tense social relations, violence, fear, the conflict between the winners and losers of war, it can become a survival strategy. Silence does not necessarily mean the absence of speech or voice; it can be embodied in the practices of the individual and the “unspoken“ can be conveyed through generations. Like memory, the “conspiracy of silence“ can connect people and become the foundation of collective identities. In the realm of beliefs, silence can also be a consequence of resisting the authority of the researcher, the collision of different worlds, the deliberate preservation of individual or collective secrets, and distrust. In ethnographic research, silence is shaped by the researcher’s position towards the interlocutor. At the end we will reflect on how ethnographic research, which contextualizes and articulates silence, can influence the opening or healing of individual and social wounds.

The presentation is designed as a mental walk from the basic concepts of physics “What is sound?“, through psychoacoustics, cognitive psychology, the social and anthropological meaning of music and its political economy to a conversation with the audience.

The author will address a few current topics of sound ecology such as sound pollution, the omnipresence of noise and its consequences, the right to silence, the processes of sound perception, the meaning of musical art and silence as a space for its emergence.

Using the example of the Music is born from silence initiative, he will present the meaning and possibility of social engagement through an acoustic ecology interactive work, which also includes the condition of silence under the phrase “freedom of expression“. The interactive advocates for following a simple guideline for creating sound images of spaces: “Wherever music is listened to, only ONE piece of music should be listened to at a time!“

This contribution will discuss the reception of John Cage within the post-war cultural and political context in Slovenia, marked by “point zero“, a break from tradition and socialist ideology. As a peripheral Central European culture, Slovenian musical culture has long remained institutionally conservative. A key shift occurred in the 1960s with the younger generation of composers (Pro musica viva), who became acquainted with avant-garde movements and stepped into modernism through the Warsaw Autumn festival.

Despite the openness to experimentation, the attitude towards Cage was markedly ambivalent. Leading composers such as Primož Ramovš, Ivo Petrić and others often understood his music as chaotic, meaningless or even as a denial of music itself, although they also accepted some of his innovations, especially on the level of sound and performance techniques. Slovenian modernism was thus formed between two extremes: a rejection of the excessively rational serialism and a distrust of Cage’s “irrationality“, while remaining strongly attached to the idea of tradition.

Cage’s ideas therefore gained greater resonance outside institutional music, especially in intermedia arts, happenings and experimental theatre (e.g. the OHO group). Individuals such as Janko Jezovšek and Vinko Globokar further developed his concepts, but they mostly operated outside the main Slovenian space. In the 1970s, Cage continued to influence experimental collectives (NOMENKLATURA, OM produkcija, SAETA), in which improvisation, indeterminacy, audience involvement and the intertwining of artistic media were established. Despite these shifts, Cage remained primarily a reference for alternative and interdisciplinary practices and did not penetrate the core of the Slovenian institutional musical culture.

The bioacoustic sound sculpture Inaudible – Audible, among the Bats reveals an almost inaudible world of frequency ranges emitted by bats that are usually inaccessible to humans. The project is positioned between sound ecology and bioacoustic music, as it processes the sounds of the night environment and bats from the ultrasonic spectrum and transposes them into the human audible range.

The composition consists of audible night sounds, joined by transposed bat voices and other nocturnal sound sources. The final sound space consists of an inner – castle, distant forest and central space, represented by the external platform surrounding the castle. The composition includes electroacoustic processing of the sound material and is played as a spatial, 3D or 360-degree sound projection.

The composer explores the intersection of the sound spectra of water and bowed string instruments and the articulation of these sounds on the palette between tone and noise. The source of the water sound recordings are rivers (Bela, Idrijca, Zadlaščica, Soča, Bača …), as well as seas and lakes. The perception of the sound of water changes with distance. The proximity of water and the intimate experience of its sounds are enabled by eight channels of lo-fi recordings, which the public stream over their mobile phones.

As the water envelops me, space opens up behind the breath. Space. Freedom. The historical atlas of atoms that are my body today draws strings into the fabric of the world. Is this the touch of ancestors? Of majestic creatures of the primeval sea? Of universal consciousness? All I know is that my desires are calmed and I will not be dropping bombs today.