Cona | Institute for Contemporary Art Processing participated at the Reveil streaming, a 24-hour live broadcasting of dawn chorus from around the Earth, for the eighth year in a row. Brane Zorman was streaming Rožnik Hill open microphone at Tivoli Park, Ljubljana. For the SoundCamp 2021 Cona also commissioned live audio performances by Jaka Berger Brgs, Colin Black, Ida Hiršenfelder beepblip, Boštjan Perovšek and Manja Ristić.
About Remembering a Tree by beepblip: Remembering a Tree is a story about gentrification and lack of sonic awareness in urban planning. It is also a story about sonic perception of other-than-human biotic life forms. At this location (46°03’22.0″N 14°30’58.4″E), the environmentalist Aldo wanted to chain himself to an old maple tree. The maple tree was to be cut down to make way for an underground parking lot and a square of concrete for the so-called museum platform. The environmentalist was convinced by a bureaucrat that it was going to be a beautiful square full of trees and life. The construction workers cut down the old tree. At first, the square was completely useless: too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Eventually, in the fall and spring months, a portion of the square was populated by skaters who make lots of noise echoing between solid concrete structures but at least they put the square to some sort of use. Most useful is the Cinematheque amphitheater, a patch of grass with small trees, where several festivals take place in the summer, including the Young Lions. The public planners conceived the amphitheatre as a luscious green centre of the square but they failed to consider that all the low-frequency hums are caught in this square dent and that no life form will ever thrive there. The trees persist in small cracks along the concrete edge. They are inhabited by a flock of birds, surrounded by reflective windows. In summer, dozens of birds get killed hitting the windows… On the other side, there is the Metelkova Autonomous Cultural Centre, a place of disorder and biodiversity, where birds live relatively freely.
Listen @ SoundCamp 2021 & Reveil Project 2021.
Commission: CONA | institute for contemporary arts processing.
SoundCamp 2021 is organised by Acoustic Commons.
Cona Commissions for SoundCamp 2021.
“A geography of sound has no maps; it produces no cartography. It is the geography of encounters, misses, happenstance and events: invisible trajectories and configurations between people and things, unfolding in the dimension of the actual while formlessly forming the dimensions of its possibility, and secretly performing the impossible territories of a poet on the night-time sea…”
— Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound, Bloomsbury Academic 2019, page 75
Voice by Ana Čavić
Special thanks to Brandon Rosenbluth
Photos by Irena Pivka, Ida Hiršenfelder
