ENERGIES will explore acoustic energies in relation to experimental practices in architecture and urbanism, through lectures, conversations, listening sessions, screenings, and workshops. Over three days, a group of invited participants will share work along such themes as vibrational architectures; energies and urban infrastructures; and violent energies of harm and alarm in the contexts of war and occupation, in particular by attuning to the sonic and auditory dimensions of the militarization, weaponization, and destruction of urban architectures and infrastructures.
During the gathering, we will together explore a shift in scenography, from a logic of solids, outlines, and fixed forms to a logic of flows, forces, intensities and movements. In this new scenography, we would like to question what happens to the urban, its infrastructures and built environments when they become energetic forms, where matters exist in tentative shapes, as vibrant potentials, and hold steady in movements and structural flows. How do we grasp, tune into and out of, the invisible forces that structure everyday and urban life in energetic and dissipative ways, or when buildings become fluid forms? What is this shapeshifting, in-between state, between the solid and the fluid, the fixed and the elusive, the material and the immaterial that energies and the energetic pulls us into? And what are the phase-shifts, transformations, and mid-flight, metamorphic forms that energy takes? A focus on energies will allow us to both rethink sound and architecture, pulling them into a shared space of inchoateness, in states of tension and conversion.
Energies is organised by SONCITIES together with the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin programme. It follows a gathering on the theme of ‘Materialities’, ‘Concrete Dreams of Sound: Experiments in Sonic Materiality’, held at DAAD Gallery in April 2024. It is co-organized by Dahlia Borsche, Sebastian Dürer, Brett Mommersteeg, and Gascia Ouzounian.
Day 1: Monday, 31 March – Energies and Architectures
10:00 – Welcome by Dahlia, Sebastian, Brett, and Gascia
10:15 – Gascia Ouzounian – Introduction: Vibrational Architectures
10:45 – Jan St. Werner – Vibraception - Investigations in Wavespace: Vibraceptional Plate
12:00 – Brett Mommersteeg – 2 or 3 Confusions about Vibration
2:00 – Samuel Perea-Díaz & Gloria Jurado – The Value of a m²
2:30 – Merche Blasco – What Hums Beyond (online)
3:45 – Mark Bain – The Archisonic
Day 2: Tuesday, 1 April – Energies and Infrastructures
10:00– Signe Lidén with Leila Ehsaninezhad – Lines and shear waves
11:45 – Susie Ibarra – Observing rhythm in nature in an urban environment
2:15 – Carsten Seiffarth – Urban sound installation art in Bonn since 2010
3:00 – Raviv Ganchrow – Itineraries of Energetic Traverse
5:00 – Book Launch Jan St. Werner - Vibraception: Investigations in Wavespace Featuring readings and performances by Jan St. Werner, Madison Greenstone, Brett Mommersteeg, and Marina Peterson
Day 3: Wednesday, 2 April – Energies of Alarm / Atmospheric Occupation
10:00– Ting-Jung Chen with Sebastian Dürer – Exhibition tour for Here on the Edge of the Sea We Sit + Conversation
11:15-1:00 PM – Panel & Discussion
• Marina Peterson – Frequency – instabilities of energetic forms
• Mhamad Safa – Collateral Listening and the Limits of International Law: Case of Gaza 2021 (online)
• Gascia Ouzounian – City of Waves: Atmospheric Occupation in Beirut
2:00 – Panel – Architects and Urbanists Respond to Energies Mark Campbell, Daniel Fisher, Diana Ibañez-Lopez, Eva Tisnikar, Ines Weizman
4:30 Yara Mekawei - Hu