Cona events source

The essay focuses on exploring specific elements of salt-making practices in the Sečovlje Saltpans. This landscape, shaped by centuries of salt production, represents an ecosystem of coexistence between humans, more-than-human beings and elemental forces. In recent decades, salt-making activity has significantly declined, leading to irreversible changes in the landscape.

The presentation examines salt-making at the intersection of environmental anthropology, eco-ethnography, eco-phenomenology and the ethics of listening, fields in which both walking and listening function as relational practices and research methods.

Through embodied practices of listening-with and walking-with, the project seeks to imagine how the four elements, water, fire, air and earth, resonate as they crystallise into salt.

Coloniality of sensing informs modern colonial ways of worlding, leading to the reinstatement of the nature–culture divide and the predominance of visuality and representation over other modes of perception and engagement such as sound, smell or touch. A growing number of critical artistic practices attempt decolonial forms of re-existence through aesthesis, revitalising marginalised affective impulses and foregrounding intertwined ecocritical concerns alongside critiques of technological coloniality.

These shifts challenge and expand traditional decolonial agendas towards a more comprehensive critical outlook that seeks to address the complexity of the crisis we inhabit.

The soundwalk weaves together personal memories, dreamlike landscapes and the brutal reality of the war in Ukraine. Conceived as an audio walk through an urban park, it alternates between realistic and surreal worlds – telling the real stories through the mindscape of an injured Ukrainian soldier. Dedicated to the Park Rastoče knjige, through multilingual narration (Slovenian, Ukrainian), VRTATYS’ sound walk brings to the audience diverse literature resources – Ukrainian baroque poetry by Hryhorii Skovoroda, Slovenian modernist prose by Ivan Cankar, an authentic Crimeantatar poem by Alie Kendzhe-Ali, as well as personal narrations and sound environments from people who are currently in Ukraine and on occupied Ukrainian territories. The project highlights the tensions between home and exile, roots and transplantation, past and future. It merges an artistic approach with documentary precision and poetic sensitivity.

How to remember the events you want to forget? How to tell stories you wish to keep silent about? How to ask questions you are afraid to hear answers to? What is the role of sound and silence in resistance to violence, the search for justice and our attempt to be together?

The soundwalk was created for a journey through the dunes of The Hague. It encompasses personal memories, the historical memory of the place and reflections on the concept of a city of peace and justice.

Garden of the Earthly Delights is a guided active listening soundwalk designed to engage participants in a multisensory exploration of their surroundings. It seeks to emphasise bodily awareness as a means of environmental communication, shifting away from solely scientific knowledge towards an intuitive, sensorial experience.

By embracing our place within the larger ecosystem, the project highlights how human perception, though shaped by our physical limitations, carries an inherent knowledge of the non-human world. Recognising patterns in plants, animals and natural formations is not learnt but deeply embedded in our sensory consciousness.

Through this experience, participants move beyond passive observation, engaging in practices that encourage an intimate and reciprocal relationship with the surroundings. The project also underscores the pleasure, necessity and urgency of such engagement. By integrating site-specific sonic and visual landmarks, the soundwalk guides participants towards deeper ecological awareness and encourages recognition of non-human ways of thinking and being.

“When the unspeakable is brought to light, it becomes political.” This statement by Annie Ernaux frames a presentation that examines how sound studies can sustain or dismantle eco-political urban discourses. At its centre stands the rat as an embodiment of the underground, the hidden and the marginalised. Here, the rat functions not only as an animal but as a metaphor for the “dark” side of urban life, which is commonly treated as a threat rather than acknowledged as coexistent.

Statistics on urban acoustics show that dominant sonic elements include noise, wind, birdsong and dogs barking, while sounds associated with infrastructure, waste and the movement of unwanted forms of life remain largely absent from research and discussion. They are pushed beyond the boundaries of both visibility and audibility. The presentation asks what we overlook and what we fail to hear when constructing assumptions for soundscape research.

The concept of the dark soundscape, derived from Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, describes this realm of hidden, overlooked and unwanted sounds that reveal deeper mechanisms of exclusion, prejudice and spatial control. Within this framework, human auditory ecology emerges as a critical field of inquiry. The project considers what might be gained by learning to listen to what has previously been unheard or ignored, and whether including “dark” sounds can broaden our understanding of the city and its ecological relations.

The A Little Bird Told Me project engages with the emerging debate on the ethics of recording, translating and communicating with non-human species. The power dynamic between recorder and recordee is challenged through sonic collaboration with a chattering community of Common Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) inhabiting London’s largest public square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Starlings are known for mimicking other birds and non-avian sounds such as car alarms, mobile phone ringtones and human speech. Their expert mimesis raises questions about how starlings participate in the oral histories of their human co-sounders. What are the ethics of starlings? Do starlings do ethics?

Through a combination of performative and speculative practices, including an unstable choral workshop in collaboration with starlings, Logan and Thompson explore where the agency of humans and non-humans begins and ends.

By playing excerpts from her composition, showing photographs from the journey and presenting her findings, La Pesch translates a 19th-century classical music work into an explorative, contemporary cross-species approach. She focuses on three shifts that have occurred from the time of B. Smetana to the present.

First, she asks what events enabled more open approaches to composition and the inclusion of other-than-human beings in this process. She explores the role of animals in music, starting with the moment when a dog spontaneously joined John Cage on stage in 1952, and reflects on how her own dog influenced her compositional practice.

She then illustrates the differences between composing orchestral music with a programmatic agenda and composing with field recordings by comparing her work to Smetana’s original composition.

Finally, she proposes a necessary narrative shift within musique concrète, acoustic ecology and field recording, arguing that the inevitably biased artist is always present in any engagement with an environment, and that this specific perspective must be made explicit in order to be questioned.

The wasteland of Ulcinj Salina, adjacent to the southernmost Montenegrin coastal town, acts as the point of departure for my concerns. In keeping with an immobile landscape in the context of theatre that moves as nodes are connected and relationships are redefined, I ask what is to be understood when the field is no longer shaped by the process of humanisation. How is the field accessible if it is not designed, and whose aesthetic notions apply in this case?

Is the barren landscape as empty as it is seen, or are there more elementary notions? Conceived through the amplified sonic iterations at the thresholds of environmental contingency, I consider a certain state of abandonment functional as a new heritage site that has evolved into a habitat due to the absence of human actors. The fieldwalk, unlike fieldwork, is unencumbered by anthropocentric intentionality.

Many of the sounds of the modern soundscape are new to history and as such to the human ear. Anthropophony has expanded greatly thanks to electromechanical and digital technology (e.g. motorised traffic, AC systems). Still, languages maintain their ability to refer to new environmental sounds, for example through onomatopoeia such as beeping, buzzing or rattling.

To investigate how sound imitation has evolved alongside changes in the soundscape, the author examined six urban sound sources (sirens, cars, fans, etc.) and identified twelve onomatopoeic verbs used by speakers in the Finnish language corpus KORP v9 to imitate the sounds produced by these sources. The verbs were then analysed in terms of etymology and usage context to shed light on linguistic adaptation.

The study shows that languages generally prefer to recycle existing verbs through semantic shifts based on metaphorical extension and or aural-affective resemblance, rather than creating entirely new ones.

This work invites humans to pay tribute to the oldest sounding beings on Earth. It asks how we might embody the sonic and social character of insects by enacting an expressive swarm resonating with the sounds of katydids, cicadas and grasshoppers, encouraging attentive and shared listening during their seasonal cycles.

AudioSwarm: Insectus is an original sound composition based on insect field recordings, designed to be performed collectively. Conceived as a participatory performative spatial diffusion, the work combines social listening and movement, enabling all participants to co-create a coherent sounding body. Everyone is warmly invited to join the swarm.

Our focus on airborne sounds in both natural and urban environments has contributed to the development of ecoacoustics. However, alongside audible soundscapes that we have become accustomed to recording and analysing, there exists another, less obvious layer: the world of substrate-borne vibrations – the so-called vibroscape.

These vibrations, which are not directly perceptible to human senses, are crucial for many animals, especially insects. While humans may attune themselves to soundscapes, many animals are equally attuned to vibroscapes. This ancient system of communication shaped early evolutionary interactions and may still be accessible to us, even if we cannot clearly determine to what extent.

In this performative lecture, the authors introduce ecotremology – a discipline that studies substrate-borne vibrations in order to reveal ecological processes and their potential contribution to conservation biology. The lecture also includes listening to recordings of various Slovenian vibroscapes produced as part of their research.

In a new residential complex near Bratislava’s city centre, the quiet comfort of middle-class life was disrupted a few summers ago by an unexpected intruder: the cicadas.

Cicada orni – a species foreign to this city – established its first permanent colony here, as confirmed by entomologists. Their deafening cry changed the soundscape of hot afternoons and signalled a shift towards a new climate reality. The gentle summers of the past are gone; extremes are here, with the cicadas’ scream as a wake-up call.

This lecture tells the story of an acoustic discovery made while wandering the city one lazy summer afternoon. It explores dissonances between place and perception, memory and climate, sound and culture. A moment of wonder, and of warning.

Over the past two decades of practice in media and transmission arts, Anna has undertaken strategies for critical detunement such as listening across radio and transmission ecologies, exploring low-fidelity audiovisuality in densely foggy coastal lands and engaging mirage, sonic distortions and camouflage to create docufiction from experience in industrialised sectors of the desert.

This performance suggests that detuned modes of low-fidelity listening and creation are tactics against the seemingly totalising narratives of global modernity, affirming the coexistence and enchantments of multiple worlds and a deeper sense of what is present.

By merging scientific research on insect vibrational communication with artistic interpretation through sound art, tremolo situates itself within a broader ecological and urban-spatial context. Musicians use sonorities transmitted through natural materials – such as leaves, branches and soil – and objects like buildings, roads and caves to reveal hidden layers of communication that are mostly inaudible to the human ear. Scientific analysis of the sound material is crucial, providing artists with verified insights into the acoustic environment. Some sounds are recognised and classified, while many others are entirely new to scientists. Often, these new sounds resemble classified ones but are identified as distinct through further analysis. At times, it remains unclear whether certain sounds originate from natural sources, as they are recorded in complex urban settings influenced by numerous factors.

This blend of scientific rigor and artistic exploration forms the creative foundation of the project. By combining these approaches, the collaboration brings a richer, more nuanced artistic experience to a wider audience.

Thus, tremolo is not just a musical work experienced through sound alone; its approach also reflects the complex relationship between urban dwellers and their habitat – what is known as the third landscape. These are abandoned urban spaces, outside the control of formal urban planning, existing as in-between zones awaiting future development. Meanwhile, these areas serve as unique habitats, fostering high biodiversity. Ljubljana’s Krater is a prime example of such a landscape.

Garden of the Earthly Delights is a guided active listening soundwalk designed to engage participants in a multisensory exploration of their surroundings. It seeks to emphasise bodily awareness as a means of environmental communication, shifting away from solely scientific knowledge towards an intuitive, sensorial experience.

By embracing our place within the larger ecosystem, the project highlights how human perception, though shaped by our physical limitations, carries an inherent knowledge of the non-human world. Recognising patterns in plants, animals and natural formations is not learnt but deeply embedded in our sensory consciousness.

Through this experience, participants move beyond passive observation, engaging in practices that encourage an intimate and reciprocal relationship with the surroundings. The project also underscores the pleasure, necessity and urgency of such engagement. By integrating site-specific sonic and visual landmarks, the soundwalk guides participants towards deeper ecological awareness and encourages recognition of non-human ways of thinking and being.

The artist takes a weather balloon as the starting point for her research and sonic journey. Used worldwide for meteorological measurements and weather forecasting, over 800 weather balloons are released daily. They rise through the atmosphere, exposed to changing air pressure, temperature, density and wind.

Our atmospheric imaginary journey begins at the entrance to the Ljubljana Castle funicular, which will carry us up to the castle. Once we reach a certain height, we will travel even further – following the tension and transformation of the balloon as it stretches to its breaking point: the sudden burst and fall. Afterwards, we will return by funicular to the foot of the castle hill.

The 40-minute sound composition combines recordings from meteorological instruments, field and studio sessions, interviews with experts and the tracking of the balloon’s path by an observer who descends, follows and collects data. We will follow the metaphorical journey of release, lifting, stretching, bursting, falling and landing. The sonic experience is guided by the artist’s voice, which explores moments of change, transformation, direction, speed, temperature, humidity, wind and more.

The layered soundscape shifts between the dreamlike and the scientific, offering intimate, physical, auditory and tactile stimuli that create a rich, multisensory experience.

Terep Project (also known as the “virtual street musician”) is inspired by exploring natural and urban soundscapes, producing and/or broadcasting field recordings, and working with them compositionally and improvisationally.

The project approaches listening as an open system in which sound materials emerge, disappear and reconfigure in relation to space, time and the listener.

Garden of the Earthly Delights is a guided active listening soundwalk designed to engage participants in a multisensory exploration of their surroundings. It seeks to emphasise bodily awareness as a means of environmental communication, shifting away from solely scientific knowledge towards an intuitive, sensorial experience.

By embracing our place within the larger ecosystem, the project highlights how human perception, though shaped by our physical limitations, carries an inherent knowledge of the non-human world. Recognising patterns in plants, animals and natural formations is not learnt but deeply embedded in our sensory consciousness.

Through this experience, participants move beyond passive observation, engaging in practices that encourage an intimate and reciprocal relationship with the surroundings. The project also underscores the pleasure, necessity and urgency of such engagement. By integrating site-specific sonic and visual landmarks, the soundwalk guides participants towards deeper ecological awareness and encourages recognition of non-human ways of thinking and being.

Return to the Perimeter is an augmented reality (AR) soundwalk conceived as a peripatetic lecture. Designed for use with a participant’s own mobile device, the experience employs GPS-triggered audio to spatially align virtual sound elements with the physical environment.

The project integrates open-source data, ethnographic interviews and original sound design – drawn from both archival and newly created materials – to explore narratives of social control and relational kinship. Spoken voices, primarily in English, function as narrative agents, alternately guiding or challenging the listener.

Although predominantly auditory, the experience incorporates interactive visual elements, including digital maps and motion sensing, creating a multimodal interface responsive to gesture, location and movement.