Polyphonic Landscapes Opening Seminar

Save the date!

Zone2Source and ArtEZ Professorship Theory in the Arts are pleased to invite you to the online opening seminar of Polyphonic Landscapes on Thursday 16 March 2023, 12:00 – 17:00.

Admission is free, click here to register.

Polyphonic Landscapes is an artistic research programme on sound and ecology in which 4 artists – Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (IN/NL), Yolande Harris (UK/US), Teemu Lehmusruusu (FI) and Lia Mazzari (IT/UK)- explore the Amstelpark during a series of residencies in the Park Studio. Their research will result in an exhibition in and outside Het Glazen Huis in the fall of 2023.

Online opening seminar

In this first seminar, the participating artist-researchers will present their projects, after which they will engage in an interview with an assigned critical friend. Each session will conclude with a Q&A.

Programme for the day:

12.00 – 12.15   Word of introduction

12.15 – 13.15   Presentation and interview Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

13.15 – 14.15   Presentation and interview Lia Mazzari

14.15 – 14.45   Break

14.45 – 15.45   Presentation and interview Yolande Harris

15.45 – 16.45   Presentation and interview Teemu Lehmusruusu

Admission fis ree, click here to register. See the website of Polyphonic Lanscapes for more information.

Landscaping

A growing number of scientists, scholars and artists agree that we have entered the Anthropocene, a geological era in which humankind has become a major force in shaping the Earth. In this context, the concept of landscape acquires a new urgency, as well as a new meaning: where landscape historically has often been thought of as a picturesque vista or a passive backdrop for human protagonists, contemporary artists and theorists conceptualise landscape not so much as a noun but as a verb. The latter expresses a continuous flux of becoming, in which both human and more-than-human agencies are entangled in a polyphony of ‘world making’, i.e. landscaping.

Listening as research

In the artistic research project Polyphonic Landscapes sound artists Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (IN/NL), Yolande Harris (UK/US), Teemu Lehmusruusu (FI) and Lia Mazzari (IT/UK) enquire into the question of how sound and the act of listening can contribute to a more active understanding of landscapes. In other words: How can our sense of hearing foster a more embodied, inclusive, relational, and reciprocal connectivity to our environment, the latter being ecologically understood as a process in which various life forms, materials, energy flows and temporalities are involved?

The underlying goal of the project is to gain more insight into how artistic research(ers) produce new entrances to layers of knowledge that are not, or hardly, accessed by regular academic practices. The ways in which the artists give shape to their explorations and how they demonstrate the public aspects of research are an important point of focus.

Polyphonic Landscapes operates at three levels:

1. Sonic research into the urgent relation between nature and culture
2. Research into the agency of both theory and practice in artistic research
3. Research into the ecology of the senses and the multisensorial

Researchers and location

In Polyphonic Landscapes these questions will be explored by four internationally acclaimed sound artists. Their one-year-long artistic research will result into the creation of new sound works that facilitate embodied and situated ways of knowing and experiencing landscapes. To foster a fruitful cross-pollination between artistic practice and critical theory, researchers of the ArtEZ Professorship Theory in the Arts (led by Peter Sonderen, project leader Joep Christenhusz) and Zone2Source director Alice Smits will act as a theoretical sounding board, alongside other experts.

The artists will focus their research on the specific landscape of the fifty-year-old Amstelpark where Zone2Source is located. The Amstelpark, designed for the Floriade in 1972, is a hybrid environment in which the urban and natural are closely intertwined. The proceedings of their investigations will be shared during three public research seminars. To conclude the project, the connected sound works will be exhibited by Zone2Source from mid-September through mid-November 2023.

National Research Agenda (NWA)

Polyphonic Landscapes is part of the Art Route NWA-project Bit by bit, or not at all within the scheme ‘Small Projects’ which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). In this project several cluster questions will be addresses that were posed by the National Research Agenda. For instance: ‘What is quality of life?’ and ‘What does art mean to people?’.

Polyphonic Landscapes seeks to find new perspectives on these questions by means of artistic research that inquires after the relationship between nature and culture, and the position of the human and non-human in particular. It endorses the NWA Art Route’s view that, in the face of global climate breakdown, art can be an alternative way of knowledge production that sidesteps dichotomies between subject and object, knowing and experiencing, human and non-human, in the face of climate breakdown.