Polyphonic Landscapes: Circular seminar
the Orangerie, Amstelpark
14 June 2023, 12:00pm – 17:00pm
Join us for the second research seminar of Polyphonic Landscapes on Wednesday June 14 from 12:00 – 17:00. The event will take place live in the Amsterdam Amstelpark, with the possibility of a live stream. To register for the event, please click here.
Four cycles sketch by Yolande Harris
CIRCULAR SEMINAR
During this second seminar of Polyphonic Landscapes, the four participating artists will engage in a circular and participatory setting to share and discuss the key concepts of their research with the audience. The event encourages social dialogue, co-discussion, and co-thinking and will feature indoor sessions held in the Orangerie, interspersed with soundwalks and immersive listening exercises in the surroundings of Amstelpark.
The programme (see schedule below for more details) consists of four ‘circles’, each of which will be curated and led by one of the artists.
[12.00 – 12.15] Word of introduction
[12.15 – 13.15] In his research project The Pulse (at Amstelpark) (working title) Teemu Lehmusruusu aims to examine the surroundings of the Amstelpark by measuring environmental data and taking these measurements as a starting point for creating sonic sculptures act as ‘soil guards’, connecting to the dynamics of the soil-atmosphere-relation and collecting the environmental data on site in an exploratory mode. The intention of the data-gathering in this context is not to build scientific models, but to reach out to a bodily and experience-based way of knowing our interconnectedness with the natural world. In the seminar’s first circle, titled ‘The Soil Cycle’, Lehmusruusu invites you to engage with both an inner contemplation and a shared dialogue on the relationship with the Earth’s body of soil.
[13.15 – 14.15] For Polyphonic Landscapes: Hydrophile, Lia Mazzari explores how live audio streaming engenders different modalities of being and listening with environments. At a time of digital saturation and accelerating planetary crisis, her project investigates the affordances and limitations of live audio streaming, making contributions to creative discourses on environmental sound and developing new creative/compositional strategies for engaging audiences in listening events. During Lia’s circle we will engage in a listening exercise with live audio streams followed by a discussion in the Amstelpark.
— Bring your own smartphone with data connectivity and a decent pair of headphones! —
[14.15 – 14.45] Break
[14.45 – 15.45] In Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land Budhaditya Chattopadhyay delves into an sonically empowered intervention into the landscape, focussing on the site of the Amstelpark, which is a man-made nature, much like the canonical landscape paintings this project focuses on in order to unpack notions of mediation, rendering, and Anthropocenic appropriation of land into spectacle. The project intends to inculcate a dialogic context within which an intersubjective approach to the perception of land as an equitable habitat of human and non-human lifeforms is developed. This approach of reciprocity and intersubjectivity helps to counteract the nature-culture binary with ambient and environmental aesthesis. The complacent and stagnant landscape paintings of the colonial era are reread and deconstructed sonically, thus making them susceptible to questions of decoloniality, Anthropocene, politics of the senses, rights of nature and ownership of land.
[15.45 – 16.45] In the final circle Vertigo and the Sound Portal Yolande Harris invites us to explore states of sonic reorientation through the vertiginous experience of a sound portal. Harris writes: ‘How do we experience an overlaying of the sound of two places at once? Presence over distance, one environment augmenting another through sound, the potential for increased connection and empathy. I have become fascinated by such an expanded perception and the idea of a ‘sound portal’. A sound portal – the transition from sensing one place to simultaneous places – encourages a heightened sensitivity and relational reorientation, facilitated by sound and listening.’
[16.45 – 17.00] Wrap up.
