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  from October 6th to December 3rd, 2023.

Listening as research

The sound artists of Polyphonic Landscapes investigate how we can create a more active understanding of landscape with sound and listening. In other words: How can our sense of belonging promote a more bodily, inclusive, relational and mutual connection with our environment, the latter understood ecologically as a process involving different life forms, materials, energy flows and times?

The underlying goal of the project is to gain more insight into how artistic research(ers) produce new inputs to layers of knowledge that are not or hardly accessible through regular academic practices. The ways in which the artists shape their explorations and how they show the public aspects of research are an important point of attention.

Polyphonic Landscapes works on three levels:

1. Sonic research into the urgent relationship 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 multisensory
Researchers and location

Researchers and location
In Polyphonic Landscapes these questions are explored by four internationally renowned sound artists. Their one-year artistic research will culminate in new sound works that enable new ways of knowing and experiencing landscapes. To promote a fruitful cross-pollination between artistic practice and critical theory, researchers from the ArtEZ Theory in Art professorship (led by Peter Sonderen, project leader Joep Christenhusz) and Zone2Source director Alice Smits will act as a theoretical sounding board, among 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 the natural are closely intertwined. The results of their research will be shared during three public research seminars. To conclude the project, the connected sound works will be exhibited by Zone2Source from October to mid-December 2023.

National Research Agenda (NWA)
Polyphonic Landscapes is part of the Art Route NWA project Piece by piece, or not at all, within the ‘Small Projects’ scheme funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This project addresses various cluster questions posed in the National Research Agenda. For example: “What is quality of life?” and “What does art mean to people?”.

Polyphonic Landscapes seeks new perspectives on these questions through artistic research that explores the relationship between nature and culture, and the position of the human and non-human in particular. It endorses the NWA Art Route’s vision that, in light of global climate breakdown, art can be an alternative mode of knowledge production that circumvents the dichotomies between subject and object, knowing and experiencing, human and non-human.