Night Air: Soil Samples

Sonic Acts Podcast

NIGHT AIR: SOIL SAMPLES 24 April 2021 - Online Transmission Soil Samples gathers four artists and researchers for performances, presentations and discussions addressing the topic of soil and its geopolitical, colonial, and bodily entanglements. The panel is made up of sound artist Felicity Mangan, researcher and 'tiny miner' Martin Howse, biogeochemist and critical ecologist Kunal Palawat working in tandem with visual artist Dorsey Kaufmann. The event was transmitted online from Rotterdam on Saturday 24 April 2021, with participants and the audience joining from various locations worldwide. FELICITY MANGAN Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist and composer based in Berlin since 2008. In different situations, from solo performances and installations to collaborative projects with other artists, Felicity plays with the timbre of animal voices and field recordings to create minimal quasi-bioacoustic environments. Recently, the artist has been exploring the fundamentals of soil life and interspecies creativity, delving into soil’s soundscape, equipped with sensors and imagination. MARTIN HOWSE Martin Howse is occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth, software and the human psyche through the construction of experimental situations, material artworks and texts. From 1998 to 2005 Howse was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. For the last ten years, he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide. KUNAL PALAWAT Kunal Palawat is a terrestrial biogeochemist and critical ecologist currently working at the intersections of pollution, community-based research, data science, and environmental justice at the University of Arizona on occupied Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui lands (so-called Tucson) in the Ramírez-Andreotta Lab. They are also a Lab Manager and Research Associate with the Critical Ecology Lab, a non-profit research and education container striving to explicitly connect systems of oppression/liberation to global change. DORSEY KAUFMANN Dorsey Kaufmann actively challenges disciplinary boundaries by making work at the intersection of art, environmental science, and politics. She primarily works in time-based media; including video, performance, animation, and 3-D installations. Her practice examines the conflict among corporations, governments, and community health. Her work visualises how these tensions and perceptions constantly define and redefine our built environment. NIGHT AIR Night Air is a series of online transmissions from Sonic Acts that aims to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from colonial exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, destructive capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations. More information about Soil Samples and its participants can be found at https://bit.ly/3H6YTbH. CREDITS Production: Sonic Acts Host: Margarita Osipian Visual design: Deborah Mora Sound design: Igor Dubreucq Additional help: Mark den Hoed, Karl Klomp, Karl Moubarak and Jorg Schellekens, as well as Hackers and Designers and The Hmm. Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Sonic Acts is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) and Paradiso.