Time to Listen: Program Day 1
DAY ONE: Friday, 26. June 2026
13:00 Registration and welcome coffee | Studiofoyer
13:30-14:15 Nardi Simpson: Winangaylaylaya (interactive workshop) | Buchengarten
Australian First Nations Yuwaalaraay storyteller, performer and composer Nardi Simpson will conduct an interactive workshop drawing upon stories, language, and melody to explore what it is to listen, to understand, to relate and to share. Guided by the Yuwaalaraay concept of winangaylaylaya, Nardi will explore practices of deep thinking, knowing, understanding, and respect. This workshop introduces Yuwaalaraay relationality as it unfolds among people, the living world, its inhabitants, ancestors, and the stories inherent within them, inviting participants to reflect on their roles, obligations, and responsibilities within the practice of winangaylaylaya.
Nardi Simpson is a multi‑award‑winning Yuwaalaraay novelist, composer, and researcher. Her work spans literature, music, and community practice, with commissions for major ensembles and festivals, and research centred on Yuwaalaraay music and women’s knowledge of waterways, creation, and healing. She is a postdoctoral researcher on Liza Lim’s ARC Laureate project ‘Resonant Earth: music, ecology & climate justice’ (officially: »Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication«).
14:15-14:30 Welcome and introduction | Studiofoyer
by Carola Bauckholt (Director of the Academy of Arts Music Section), Lisa Benjes (head of the field notes program at inm) and Julia Gerlach (Secretary of the Academy of Arts Music Section) and Liza Lim, (head of the music-based, multi-year research project ‘Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication’ (2025–2029) at the University of Sydney)
14:30-15:15 Two Parallel Sessions:
- Ambient Tremology: on amplifying vibrational ecologies | Studiofoyer
Ambient Tremology is a transdisciplinary artistic research initiative by Kosmas Phan Ðinh, Mae Lubetkin, and Michal Mitro that reorients the act of listening from the sonic toward the vibratory, thereby making contact with the trembling matter of amphibious worlds. Through vibration recording and haptic experience, the work unfolds in the soaked and brackish environments of the Ro manian Danube Delta, tracing granular memories, waterways in transition, and forms of other-than-human transmission. In dialogue with researchers from the emerging science of Ecotremology, the artists’ collective employs self-adapted devices for field recording while at the same time foregrounding bodily technologies, such as listening through the bones and sensing with the whole body. These practices become contact zones with other worlds. The sound lecture presents an audio paper and a listening demonstration using an adapted accelerometer device, alongside reflections on vibrational ecologies and on protocols of listening in the field.
- Carlos Gutierrez/Tatiana Lopez: CHRRR XH’IXI Q’LNK | Clubraum
For Time to Listen, Carlos Gutiérrez and Tatiana López present CHRRR XH’IXI Q’LNK as a practice of listening-with rather than listening-to. Developed along the River Spree, the work unfolds as a porous ritual where bodies, clay, wind, and water enter unstable zones of co-resonance. Drawing on Andean epistemologies, sound is approached as animacy: a vibratory force that traverses and entangles human and more-than-human actors.
Their session invites a shift from composition to attunement. Ceramic objects breathe, friction murmurs, surfaces tremble; participants become temporary hosts of hybrid sonic presences—animal, vegetal, atmospheric. Listening drifts from control toward exposure, from structure toward situated sensing.
Rather than producing a work, the practice cultivates conditions for something to happen: a distributed field where agency flickers, leaks, and recomposes itself. In this unstable ecology, creativity emerges as negotiation, misalignment, and resonance across species, materials, and imaginaries.
15:15-15:30 Coffee Break | Sesselclub
15:30-16:15 Two Parallel Sessions:
- Echo Ho: 33 Fingering Methods for Qin | Studiofoyer
This lecture-performance is based on the doctoral research project Reimagining Qin Fingering Pedagogy through Embodied Artistic Research (Kunstuniversität Linz). The qin is a Chinese seven-stringed instrument with a history spanning three millennia. Its notation organises fingering choreography that encodes the production of sound, rather than specifying pitch or tempo. The thirty-three hand-posture charts from the 16th-century qin handbook Taiyin Daquanji serve as a pedagogical apparatus that coordinates movement, listening, and attention within a broader cosmic order and ecological correspondence. For example, wind startles the crane to dance, and the calling dove summons the rain. These methods constitute an early pattern language operating across technical, semantic, imagistic, and philosophical registers.
In the lecture-performance, these historically dormant charts are translated into an algorithmic vocabulary for voice, sonic material, musical gesture, and video collage. As a new mode of enactment, the performance critically examines the conditions these charts establish and explores the creative spaces for more-than-human sonic practice and embodied encounters that they enable in contemporary contexts.
- Dugal McKinnon: Joining the Chorus | Clubraum
Joining the Chorus explores the sonic and embodied world of kihikihi-wawā—chorus cicadas (Amphipsalta zelandica). Blending listening with participatory activity, the session will draw its audience into an acousomatic (acoustic-somatic) encounter with these iconic insects and their summertime ensounding of Aotearoa (NZ), exploring embodied resonance, cross-species perception, and collective sonic formation.
Emerging from artistic practice and informed by Māori and Western knowledge systems, Joining the Chorus explores intimate yet asymmetrical relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, highlighting connection and difference, and building from the foundational Māori understanding of whakapapa—all existence as interconnected kin—to enact a productive tension with Western multispecies thought.
The presentation has been developed through consultation with Jerome Kavanagh Poutama and Ruiha Turner, master practitioners of taonga puoro (traditional Māori instruments), entomologist Julia Kasper, Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, and creative technologist Dr Jim Murphy.
16:30-17:30 Music, Sound Art and Multispecies Justice. Open discussion moderated by Liza Lim | Studiofoyer
Amid planetary crisis, communities worldwide are nurturing and co‑creating relational forms of life grounded in reciprocity, care, and respect—drawing on longstanding Indigenous practices while experimenting with multispecies justice and more‑than‑human governance.
Time to Listen (26–27 June 2026) asks what sound can do within this turn. Participants are invited to expand listening and music‑making beyond the human, attuning to animals, plants, rivers, ecosystems, and technologies as sonic partners, and situating sound within ecologically interconnected worlds.
Practices of Deep Listening and Environmental Sound Art have played a key role in reshaping ideas of collective and distributed creativity in Western art music. Established methodologies—ranging from field recording and ecological data sonification to community‑led and participatory art‑making—continue to expand interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of political, social, scientific, and aesthetic inquiry.
What might a multispecies justice lens, oriented toward the more‑than‑human, bring to this work? What responsibilities, ethical questions, critiques, joys, and disruptions could become transformative forces within both contemporary artistic practice and collective life?
Starting at 18:00 spreeklänge. A musical path about and along the water
Eleven international composers were invited to compose new works for specific locations along Berlin’s largest waterway—as a response to the respective geographical site and urban environment, as well as to local and global knowledge of water and multi-species ecosystems. ‘spreeklänge’ create immersive soundscapes while also addressing questions regarding the significance of water in indigenous communities and the rights and dignity of rivers and non-human beings. The project’s acoustic-relational space spans from Philippine stalactite caves to the sounds of water that can only be perceived through the body, to an encounter with diverse bat species along the Faule Spree. Utopias are staged with singers in rowboats, field names of the West and the East part of the river Spree are recited, and an Andean sound cosmos is brought to life by students.
Composers: Peter Ablinger, Cathy van Eck, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Stephan Froleyks, Carlos Gutiérrez & Tatiana López, Susie Ibarra, Liza Lim, Kate Milligan, Trond Reinholdtsen, Annette Schmucki, Kristine Tjøgersen
With: Evelina Dembacke, Die Maulwerker, ELISION Ensemble, Fernanda Farah, Frauenchor der Künste Berlin, Karin Hellqvist, Ellen Jerstad, Christian Kesten, Jake Landau, Tatiana López, Phusiris de los Andes, Selbstgebaute Musik, Bilawa Ade Respati, Schüler*innen (Heinz-Berggruen-Gymnasium/Schinkel Grundschule), Lars A. Skoglund, Studierende der Universität der Künste und FU Berlin, Jennifer Torrence
Artistic direction: Julia Gerlach, Daniel Ott
Akademie der Künste Berlin
From Caprivibrücke to Rohrdammbrücke in Berlin-Charlottenburg
Entry every 15 minutes in time slots from 6 to 7:45 pm
Entry at the Rosengarten by the Caprivibrücke (U7 Richard-Wagner-Platz)
Finish at Ruhwaldweg by the Rohrdammbrücke (shuttle to U7)
Info und tickets: adk.de/spreeklaenge
