Ecotones: Investigating Sounds and Territories
year:
2025
Published by Spector Books.
The Luxembourg Pavilion at the 19th Architecture Biennale in Venice is an invitation to close our eyes and actively listen. The installation hosted in the pavilion, Sonic Investigations, operates a radical shift away from the visual: it offers a cartography of various environments exclusively through sound. The volume, conceived as a companion to the sound installation in Venice, has a broad ambition: it argues for a counter-project to the hegemony of images.
Since the climate crisis can also be understood as a crisis of sensory perception and representation, it is all the more urgent to find new ways of approaching the ongoing environmental transformations. The act of listening allows for different forays into both anthropic and natural ecosystems. It directs our attention toward the vocality of other-than-human agencies; it empowers them with a voice of their own.
Field recording can thus be the prelude to another mapping of the world, attuning our ears to its various fault lines, to its tensions. And sounding becomes a powerful investigative tool, a way of auscultating the infrastructures of the present as well as the times to come. The concept of Ecotone, a transitional space between two ecosystems, is a guiding thread for the authors of this volume as they listen to boundaries between territories, to urban patterns, to natural balances and imbalances, or to political fractures.
The book includes contributions by Peter Szendy, Shannon Mattern, Tim Ingold, Soline Nivet and Ariane Wilson, David George Haskell, Ludwig Berger, Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish (Bogong Centre for Sound Culture), Nadine Schütz, Laure Brayer (AAU-CRESSON), Julia Grillmayr, Christina Gruber and Sophia Rut (Lobau Listening Comprehensions), Yuri Tuma (Institute for Postnatural Studies), Emma McCormick Goodhart, as well as a fiction piece by Xabi Molia and poems by Laura Vazquez and Cole Swensen. The graphic identity is designed by Pierre Vanni.
location:
N/Ateam:
Alice Loumeau, Mike Fritsch, Peter Szendyyear:
2025
commissioner:
Luxembourg pavilion at the Venice Architecture BiennalePublished by Spector Books.
The Luxembourg Pavilion at the 19th Architecture Biennale in Venice is an invitation to close our eyes and actively listen. The installation hosted in the pavilion, Sonic Investigations, operates a radical shift away from the visual: it offers a cartography of various environments exclusively through sound. The volume, conceived as a companion to the sound installation in Venice, has a broad ambition: it argues for a counter-project to the hegemony of images.
Since the climate crisis can also be understood as a crisis of sensory perception and representation, it is all the more urgent to find new ways of approaching the ongoing environmental transformations. The act of listening allows for different forays into both anthropic and natural ecosystems. It directs our attention toward the vocality of other-than-human agencies; it empowers them with a voice of their own.
Field recording can thus be the prelude to another mapping of the world, attuning our ears to its various fault lines, to its tensions. And sounding becomes a powerful investigative tool, a way of auscultating the infrastructures of the present as well as the times to come. The concept of Ecotone, a transitional space between two ecosystems, is a guiding thread for the authors of this volume as they listen to boundaries between territories, to urban patterns, to natural balances and imbalances, or to political fractures.
The book includes contributions by Peter Szendy, Shannon Mattern, Tim Ingold, Soline Nivet and Ariane Wilson, David George Haskell, Ludwig Berger, Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish (Bogong Centre for Sound Culture), Nadine Schütz, Laure Brayer (AAU-CRESSON), Julia Grillmayr, Christina Gruber and Sophia Rut (Lobau Listening Comprehensions), Yuri Tuma (Institute for Postnatural Studies), Emma McCormick Goodhart, as well as a fiction piece by Xabi Molia and poems by Laura Vazquez and Cole Swensen. The graphic identity is designed by Pierre Vanni.
photography: Clelia Cadamuro