Land to Return, Land to Care
Online broadcast: Live audio streams from open microphones in the Ukraine at: acousticommons.net
Dates: Sat 5th November 2022 – 09:00–21:00 (UTC+1/UK) / 11:00–23:00 (UTC+3/Ukraine)
http://acousticommons.net/listen/land-to-return/index#
Land to Return, Land to Care is a collaboration between artists in Ukraine and the UK, presented as a 12-hour live transmission work, mixed in London and online.
Join us for a live online listening event that builds upon work created in September 2022 as part of a week-long workshop exploring live environmental audio streaming within arts practices. Implemented in the scope of an artistic research lab on experiences of the war, five artists from different regions of Ukraine were invited to take part in the project, collaborating and developing new work with support from the project partners.
Reflecting upon the project’s core theme of changes to the landscape caused by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, each artist built a portable ‘streambox’ that works as an open microphone, streaming the sounds of their location to an online sound map. Listen to excerpts from the artists’ initial projects at the archive here: http://acousticommons.net/listen/land-to-return/index#archive
On Saturday the 5th of November, the artists will revisit and expand upon their initial experiments with the streamboxes. The project’s starting point was to look deeply into how the full-scale invasion has changed the participants’ soundworld and shifted their perceptions of everyday sounds. The artists have taken a broad range of approaches to exploring this brief, from taking a streambox on an overnight train journey to re-enacting the sounds of digging a decoy trench.
The streams explore a series of questions around our relationship with sound and silence, such as: What does silence mean within the context of the invasion? Which sounds signal danger and which mark defense? And how might sounds fulfill a double role in triggering traumatic memories whilst also transporting us to the landscapes that we love and would like to return to? Collectively, we have been looking at the streams as a tool to overcome disconnections and isolation, exploring sounds which are not normally perceived as ‘important’ or ‘valuable’, but which combine to create a texture of everyday life.
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Participating artists: Ivan Skoryna, Kseniia Shcherbakova, Viktor Konstantinov, Kseniia Yanus, and Maxym Ivanov.
Project partners: Museum of Odesa Modern Art, NGO Slushni Rechi, cultural memory platform Past / Future / Art, Soundcamp, Acoustic Commons.
This project is supported by the British Council under the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture and Creative Europe.
