Cona events source

The Memodrom soundwalk is a compost of memories of the most beautiful city in the world. It unexpectedly guides you through a spiral of memory in which the city by the river becomes a labyrinth, and sound triggers situations that surface from oblivion.

Memodrom creates a parallel experience of the city in which public infrastructure does not serve as functional space. It merely exists only as a backdrop for the actions within the sound space. Instead of an immersive experience, we create an emersive experience. Memodrom idolises your right to forget.

In less than an hour, it exposes you to the sonic memories of generations who have experienced Ljubljana through older sound carriers. Using the “file” reproduction method, we will collectively revive these memories – from evergreen music hits to public figures overlooked by history to the city’s supposedly most invasive inhabitants.

Would you like to set aside one of your memories, too? Memodrom awaits your call.

Even before water becomes something we need to protect, it is the stuff of dreams. This soundwalk begins with the awareness that we ourselves are bodies of water and that our responsibility to water is deeply connected to how we remember and imagine the world. Water, as an element, becomes a material conduit for our imagination and an extension of our connective tissues.

We draw on the works of Gaston Bachelard and Ivan Illich, thinkers deeply engaged with water, who argued that imagination is not merely the ability to form mental images but an embodied capacity that enables creative coexistence with the world. Bachelard describes water as the “eye of the world”—not only because it reflects the sky, but because its depths hold fragments of the past; deep water is a silent memory, an embodied symbol of how the past continually inhabits the present.

Our journey moves from clear, lively spring and river waters to heavier, dormant and dead waters. We walk among songs, verses and images, navigating the temporalities of different bodies of water – from surface currents to the riverbed depths; from the river of forgetfulness to the lake of memories. In an era of constant flow – of information, people, currencies and traffic – while navigating the rapids of time, we will build a temporary harbour at the “pool that contains the whole world”, in the “moment of the dream that contains the whole soul”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?

The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.

The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovative  in-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.

The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.

A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:

The Memodrom soundwalk is a compost of memories of the most beautiful city in the world. It unexpectedly guides you through a spiral of memory in which the city by the river becomes a labyrinth, and sound triggers situations that surface from oblivion.

Memodrom creates a parallel experience of the city in which public infrastructure does not serve as functional space. It merely exists only as a backdrop for the actions within the sound space. Instead of an immersive experience, we create an emersive experience. Memodrom idolises your right to forget.

In less than an hour, it exposes you to the sonic memories of generations who have experienced Ljubljana through older sound carriers. Using the “file” reproduction method, we will collectively revive these memories – from evergreen music hits to public figures overlooked by history to the city’s supposedly most invasive inhabitants.

Would you like to set aside one of your memories, too? Memodrom awaits your call.

The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?

The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.

The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovative  in-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.

The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.

A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:

Echoing the Youth Palace is a sound workshop developed by Mladi zmaji in collaboration with the Cona Institute. The programme offers hands-on work with sound, from equipment basics and production foundations to field recording and collaborative editing.

Through soundwalking, recording, and composing, participants explore the acoustic landscape of the emerging Youth Palace centre. The resulting sound composition was used in the documentary Palača Cukrarna and later presented in an exhibition context.

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.

This deep listening experience enables a closer connection with the space and landscape, with the meadows that surround us. The walk directs attention to the sonic traces of wild nature persisting within the cultural landscape. It highlights an acoustic ecology shaped through the collaboration of nature and people. What can we hear when we listen to the meadows?

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.

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.

This deep listening experience enables a closer connection with the space and landscape, with the meadows that surround us. The walk directs attention to the sonic traces of wild nature persisting within the cultural landscape. It highlights an acoustic ecology shaped through the collaboration of nature and people. What can we hear when we listen to the meadows?

Ambisonic sound event and multi-channel sound installation

The Tree Spirits| Touch sound work reflects on the life of a tree, speculating on its acoustic component, and explores the interaction of an individual part of a plant with the colony of organisms and the forest biotic community. The sound recordings give voice to the existence of a tree in its annual and life cycles which begin and end in silence. The silence anticipating the springtime resurgence of sap flow, and the silence of destruction caused by climate change, drought, and fires. Brane Zorman is one of the three winners of Palma Ars Acoustica EBU competition 2022. You can read more about the conceptualization of work in the pdf notebook (link here) or buy printed verison of the booklet (here).

The artist zeros in on the touch; touch as an expression of genuine concern and awareness of the coexistence with plants, and a destructive touch of environmental devastation. The sounds of touching a tree trunk, branches rubbing against each other, the crushing of loose bark, the foliage, the rustling of trees in the wind, water drenching the roots – an acoustic journey through the physical existence of a tree. All the way to branch breaking, tree falling and a fire, a warning of the upcoming drought which is always a hard blow to a forest habitat.

Live Sound Event

Brane Zorman performs a live adaptation of Spirit of Trees | Touch, a work that evolved over two years in different phases and intensities. The performance employs spatial ambisonic technology and Silent Disco equipment, consisting of multiple micro FM transmitters and short-range headphones operating on various frequencies. The sound immerses the listener from all directions, creating an intense sonic experience where tones blend, shift, and reshape within a 360° spherical space. The ambisonic system allows the artist to manipulate spatial layers of sound while simultaneously transmitting them through conventional stereo headphones. Listening becomes a multi-dimensional experience, dissolving the boundaries between the audience and the sonic environment.

Art Installation

The installation demonstrates, investigates, and records the changes in the electrical conductivity, which are the result of the intensive drying process of the individual tree cookies (sliced portions of a tree trunk), converting the parameters – through heat, electrical and oscillation sensors, and converters – in the visual and acoustic forms. The cookies dry up and crack. They are colonised by microbes, mould, and fungi, and in the process of decomposition change their forms. Symbolically, these newly formed tree structures confront us with the shortage of water and moisture. The composition with the recorded and processed tree sounds, produced both within the organism as well as when touched by a human or the environment, builds an emotional and dramatic narrative charged with the natural and amplified sounds comingling and entwining. A dynamic 8-channel installation pulls the listener in the very centre of a sound happening.

O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless remembering’s and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom. where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all — what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why? [1]

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes introduces us to a poetic series of questions about invisible visions and audible silences that explore consciousness. His introduction served as inspiration for the original performance on the staircase of Cukrarna – a building rich in history, where the walls have absorbed the sonorities of the fates of Slovene modernist writers.

The work is now presented in a new location, in Navje Park in Ljubljana. The sound performance transforms into an immersion into echoes of the past, as participants create a sonic landscape through walking, evoking stored visions from the park itself. In this way, all the surfaces of the park become instruments of the visitors, amplifying the silences. The work raises more questions than it answers, reflecting Jaynes’s idea of consciousness as an intangible realm of the mind.

The technical core of the performance involves a sound sensor, a software algorithm, and a digitised database of modernist poetry. Together, these elements create a complex sonic tapestry composed of layered sounds and the inner voices of the literati.

[1] The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes, Penguin books, 1990.

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.

O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless remembering’s and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom. where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all — what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why? [1]

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes introduces us to a poetic series of questions about invisible visions and audible silences that explore consciousness. His introduction served as inspiration for the original performance on the staircase of Cukrarna – a building rich in history, where the walls have absorbed the sonorities of the fates of Slovene modernist writers.

The work is now presented in a new location, in Navje Park in Ljubljana. The sound performance transforms into an immersion into echoes of the past, as participants create a sonic landscape through walking, evoking stored visions from the park itself. In this way, all the surfaces of the park become instruments of the visitors, amplifying the silences. The work raises more questions than it answers, reflecting Jaynes’s idea of consciousness as an intangible realm of the mind.

The technical core of the performance involves a sound sensor, a software algorithm, and a digitised database of modernist poetry. Together, these elements create a complex sonic tapestry composed of layered sounds and the inner voices of the literati.

[1] The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes, Penguin books, 1990.

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.

The story opens perspectives on the architecture of Edvard Ravnikar and his collaborators in the construction of Cankarjev dom.

The authors incorporated numerous quotes and reflections by architects, as well as politicians and cultural figures connected with the building of Cankarjev dom. These are interwoven with poetry and drama by selected artists. The subtle and semantically multilayered soundwalk outlines the period of construction and the architecture of the building itself in the context of the present, offering a deeper understanding of its historical and cultural background.

The audio narrative also touches upon Ravnikar’s wider creative oeuvre, from the design of Republic Square as a demanding and long-term spatial intervention to his pedagogical work at the School of Architecture in Ljubljana. In his characteristic understanding of urban space, Ravnikar involved numerous architects and students who, in dialogue with politics and the broader professional field, laid the foundations for high-quality spatial design in a modernist Mediterranean spirit.