PEACES SO FAR | FrauVonDa//

With PEACES SO FAR, FrauVonDa// calls for new, socially inclusive alliances in a broad coalition of interdisciplinary partners: an Oder community spanning society—between residents, aquatic ecologists, historians, musicians, local choirs, and the public; between scientific institutions and village communities in Brandenburg and Poland.
The focus is on the Oder as a border river that has been contested for centuries, but which has also always been a link between both banks. The Second World War marked a turning point and left deep wounds that continue to prevent transnational structures to this day – within the population, but also in the aquatic ecological protection of the Oder region.

From the largely unregulated Czech meanders to Silesia, which is struggling with the historical and ecological legacy of coal mining, to the battlefields of war in the Oderbruch and the Lower Oder Valley National Park region – with PEACES SO FAR, we embark on a historical search for traces, collecting folk songs, eyewitness accounts, and current field recordings from the river.

How do the wars continue to have an impact today – on the waters and on the people?
What influence do contaminated sites from ammunition and weapons have, including on underwater sound?

In combination with free improvisations and current compositions by Polish composer Wojtek Blecharz, a multisensory experience for HEARING, SEEING, FEELING, AND THINKING is created—a meeting place between history, the present, and visions of the future, between the findings of scientists and citizen science from the audience, residents, and artists.

The new concert format senSONICtalk© transforms citizen participation into a sensual Gesamtkunstwerk. Conversations become living art objects addressing controversial ecological, social, and political issues. Scientific facts meet artistic fiction, unfolding a multisensory, transmedial, and highly interactive experience.
Music, conversations, field research, vibration, projections, and audience input merge into an emotional-cognitive resonance space in which science becomes art, conversation becomes concert, and the audience becomes the protagonist. Each performance is dialogical, anchored in the local environment, and therefore unique.

PEACES SO FAR builds on the successful cooperation with the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries Berlin (IGB) on the Oder River.
In 2022, the IGB invited FrauVonDa// to accompany its multi-year Oder~So project artistically from different perspectives. This resulted in the first OderHive project in 2024.

PEACES SO FAR continues this multi-year artistic process and shifts the focus to the river as a border, to the cross-border similarities and the historical structures on the Oder. The circle of cooperation partners, as well as the venues, are therefore shaped in PEACES SO FAR as a broad German-Polish community.