I speak from my diaphragm / a song to your bones
picture: Tara Ulmann
listening session, in collaboration with SRTN, SOMA, Krone/Couronne, Biel/Bienne, 2025
SOMA is hosting the oral publishing house hhhhh for a series of publications on the listening platform, in the backroom of KRONE COURONNE in Biel/Bienne.
SOMA is hosting the oral publishing house hhhhh for a series of publications on the listening platform, in the backroom of KRONE COURONNE in Biel/Bienne.
For this occasion, Ines proposed a piece in collaboration with the sound artist SRTN. It offers the audience a sensitive journey through various states, moving within them, and allowing them to transform: Beginning first with anxiety and vertigo to arrive last in calmness and serenity. The performer's literal expressions and words, emanating from the diaphragm, the place in the body where fears nest, gradually transform and transition into a low-frequency composition that addresses the collective body of the audience. Pulsating, vibrating sounds are not audible but perceptible via the platform in the space.
The piece draws on intention, intuition and knowledge of Fascia Practice, a manual therapy form that adresses the connective tissue of the body. In this practice, slowness and precision evoke a bodily experience that connects with the archaic, the geological, and the ritual. In this way, the sounds resonate with the idea of tectonic movements, river flows, or volcanic eruptions: invisible but tangible forces that transform the body into a trembling territory and time into an expanded matter.
hhhhh is a fugitive publishing house co-founded by Mina Achermann and Erell Le Pape, that rethinks textual publication through orality. hhhhh does not produce printed matter but inhabits time and space as publication. It is a way of sharing what needs the sheltering opacity of fugitive oral speech in order to be told. hhhhh has no fixed place, but takes place in many places, transforming the publishing house into a place of encounter and radical listening.
SOMA 2024/2025
We listen in order to interpret our worldand experience meaning– Pauline Oliveros
Sound is a powerful medium. It’s omnipresent. It has a material-affective power of socio-cultural and political significance. How do you listen? When do you really hear?Nested in the BACKROOM of KRONE COURONNE, SOMA is a vibrating listening platform that accommodates the practice and research of sound artists through 2024/2025. SOMA investigates the emancipatory and transformative potential of sound and listening practices. Conceived as a result of curator Kristina Grigorjeva’s research and together with Ivan Crichton and Laurens Dekeyzer, SOMA invites to listen, linger, vibrate and hear collectively in a shared, plural, response-able and care-full context.SOMA is about listening as a transformative social practice and a relational way of hearing the world. In a text referring to Audre Lorde’s “The Masters tools will never dismantle the Master’s House” (1984), sound anthropologist Steven Feld suggests that we need to develop a different set of tools in order to listen to (as opposed to merely hearing) signs and signifiers, songs and birds and insects in a relational practice that performs a sonic phenomenology of the forest we are part of; through touch, smell and sound. Sounding as a “listening with”–from the somatic, interceptive to the social body.