With the Time to Listen festival, the Akademie der Künste explores how the ecological crisis becomes audible in sound and music. The festival takes place from 18 August to 3 September at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg. It includes an exhibition with sound installations, concerts, a symposium and actions in public spaces.
International artists react to the urgency of the climate and environmental crisis using musical means. They make the global perspective and worldwide concerns visible and develop scenarios where people and natural ecosystems re-establish their symbiotic relationship, reinterpret Indigenous concepts of nature and allow environmentally neutral technologies to produce sound.
Seven large-scale sound installations in the exhibition halls and the outdoor areas of the Akademie building invite visitors to listen to desert formations on the edge of the Sahara, the dwindling numbers of sturgeon in the Baltic Sea and solar sound flowers. A versatile concert programme ‒ by Carola Bauckholt, Marcus Maeder, the Acoustic Ecology Lab Mexico and Sarah Nemtsov, et al. ‒ assembles pieces that capture the last refuges of biodiversity in the soil and rainforests, melting glaciers and waste incineration in India.
A symposium on 19‒20 August, aligned with inm / field notes, concerns the extent to which hearing or listening is a precondition for deep understanding and engaging with the environment – especially in global contexts. In Arnold Dreyblatt’s Kill the Light – a house without electricity on 27 August, the audience is divided into small tour groups that go through the dark building on Hanseatenweg to explore unknown locations through artistic articulation. At the Kunstfestival Moabit “Ortstermin” (Moabit Art Festival) on 2‒3 September, members of the Akademie der Künste and guests perform and interact with Manos Tsangaris’ “Nachhaltigkeitsbude” (“sustainability booth”) in public spaces, featuring speech-choir actions, readings, climate talks and theatre miniatures.
The Akademie der Künste views itself and its programmes as a source of ideas and a mediator on the subject of sustainability. The festival Time to Listen: The Ecological Crisis in Sound and Music continues a series of events dedicated to the climate and environmental crisis and initiates a main focus programme on this subject in autumn 2023. Participation, cultural education and sustainable production methods are central concerns of the Akademie der Künste.
Time to Listen: The Ecological Crisis in Sound and Music / Festival with sound installations, concerts, a symposium, and public space actions
18.8—3.9.2023 | Doors 17:30 CET | Starts 18:00 CET
Akademie der Künste | Hanseatenweg 10 | 10557 Berlin
adk.de/time-to-listen | Event @ Facebook | Tickets
