TO)pot 2024

Festival of radical soundwalks
25 – 29 Sep 2024
Cukrarna and public spaces

Augenmas • a l l j a • Colin Black • Maja Bjelica • beepblip • Nika van Berkel • Tetiana Khoroshun • Maria Magdalena Kozlowska • Rene Markovič • Spiro Mason • OR poiesis • Irena Pivka • plants • Karmen Ponikvar • Eduardo Raon • Urša Sekirnik • Jacek Smolicki • spaces • Sava šumi • urban animals • Tea Vidmar • Miloš Vojtěchovský • Brane Zorman • Tery Žeželj

Mandatory registration for all soundwalks. Voluntary contribution upon entry.

TO)pot, a festival of soundwalks, concerts, and reflections, brings together artists, theorists, and curious walkers to connect with spaces and more-than-human entities, transforming walking and listening into a spatial realisation of location. As a practice of grounding and attuning to the environment, walking becomes a radical attempt to decelerate the everyday pace of life.

Held during a unique time of the year, when the atmosphere clears and migratory birds change territories, the noisy starlings – now common city dwellers – fall silent, and plants enter their mature period. Amidst this backdrop, the festival offers, through selected artworks, a tapping into urban spaces and paths, highlighting their multi-temporality and thus offering the possibility of embodying space. TO)pot encourages a deeper reflection of how to live-with-spaces, encompassing all beings and entities.

As part of a five-day programme and pre-festival events across various locations, this year’s festival edition presents works that explore the acoustic ecology and sonority of spaces and their multi-temporal dimensions. The main selection of artists, researchers, and spaces is interconnected by a related milieu. The featured works engage with the acoustics, history, ecology, social life, and multi-temporality of spaces, transforming the inaudible or forgotten into the audible and fostering a dialogue with more-than-human subjects … The festival’s guiding principle, Living-with-spaces, invites us to examine human relations with the environment and spaces in a (radically) different economic frameworks, through a rethinking of the concept of care and the potential benefits of slowing down.

This year’s festival presents three premieres of soundwalks produced by Cona, unified by their focus on listening to the voice of space intersecting with social temporality. These soundwalks delve into spaces rich in architectural and social heritage, unveiling layers of the city’s potential development and prompting a compassionate use for all inhabitants. Nika van Berkel and Karmen Ponikvar’s Green Atrium of the City addresses the care of a space of exceptional cultural heritage that remains closed to the public due to unresolved economic and political issues. Plečnik’s stadium, an island of silence and tranquillity, precisely because of its interrupted use, highlights the potential of alternative temporalities and economies, accessible now only through unauthorised visits. In the soundwalk Memodrom by Augenmas and beepblip, participants will navigate the sonic memories of the city centre’s tourist route. This experience, set along a memory spiral by the river and filled with time lapses, turns the city into a labyrinth where sound acts as a catalyst for deliberate forgetting of the space’s events. Sonic Archaeology of the Inner Voice, conceived by Spiro Mason over multi-year working process, and in collaboration with Rene Markovič, listens to the whispering of Cukrarna’s walls. This socially significant space, once the cradle of modernist poetry, reveals its inner voices through author-designed technological tools, allowing us to eavesdrop on the past, with the building’s sonorities grounded by the sounds of the listener’s footsteps, opening up stories imprinted in its walls.

The concern for the development of the use of space is also reflected in Urška Sava’s project, organised as a two-year research initiative monitoring the evolution of former Rog factory site. Urša Sekirnik’s walk Fent cua / While Waiting, one of the pre-festival events, investigates themes of temporality, pause and waiting, which generate anxiety and disrupt our individualistic approach to life, compelling us to stop and reflect. Invisible Cities #3 Sound Walk by Jacek Smolicki invites participants to a hybrid journey where the usually inaudible streams of the city’s infrastructure become gateways to temporally and geographically distant sonic environments and memories. The AR walk gardenGOround by Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman explores the temporality of plants and people and the possibilities of their encounter. The festival also revisits last year’s subtle soundwalks If trees would cry, we would cry too and I walked for too long and I became a landscape, both by Tery Žeželj, with the latter co-created by Maria Magdalena Kozlowska.

Additionally, the festival will feature four live sound events focusing on acoustic ecology, deep listening to the surroundings and to all beings and entities, and the far-reaching human influences that extend beyond our immediate perception and field of vision. Three of these events will take place during the first two days of the festival at Cukrarna, with the final event set to awaken us at the Plečnik Auditorium in Tivoli. We are thrilled to collaborate with Ukrainian composer Tetiana Khoroshun for the first time, and to welcome back Australian sound artist Colin Black, who will perform his internationally acclaimed composition Avian Love. This work poignantly describes Nikola Tesla’s friendship with a dove during his time in New York. Petra Kapš is preparing a concert for gourmets, and discerning listeners of the mountains. In the summer of 2023, she captured the sounds of melting glaciers and composed a delicate musical piece from these recordings. To conclude the festival, we will experience an inter-species ecological concert from the AnimotMUZIK series performed by Eduardo Raon, Teja Vidmar and a l l j a.

The theoretical part of the festival is grounded on peripatetic lectures that refine the programme’s thematic focus and emphasize the efforts of ethical and caring listening. Maja Bjelica, Miloš Vojtěchovský and Jacek Smolicki will lead these walking discussions, exploring perspectives on listening to landscapes. Their reflections will also address the themes of the upcoming CENSE (Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies) conference, scheduled for 2025 and to be hosted in Slovenia for the first time.

This year’s festival seeks to unpack the significance of slowing down social time through walking and listening, encouraging a different use of spaces that can be reclaimed from the hyperproduction of temporality. By shifting focus from visual to auditory perception, the festival aims to unlock a more inclusive use of the environment, treating it as a holistic ecosystem encompassing all entities. Perhaps the development of a deep ecological mindset could help us slow down human time and better appreciate the interconnectedness of human and non-human animals, plants, and spaces. The festival endeavours to inextricably weave together these elements, highlighting the importance of coexistence and the quality of temporality it fosters. Through listening and engaging with the life of spaces and non-human beings, we may discover new insights and learn invaluable lessons.