collection

From a heavily pixelated, thumb-nail sized video(1), the cry of a tinny, warbled saroz and the beat of a faint, grainy damboora together sound a lossy lament. In one version of an infinitely versioned folktale(2), a lover stunned with grief disappears into a chorus of cypress trees. And in a zikrkhana by the sea a group of women chant praise and remembrance in palimpsestic tongues(3). 

the wanderers taught me longing / the mystics taught me lament (reprise) is a distilled audio edit of a work currently on exhibition at Auto Italia (London) as part of the show Noorani Metal Sound. Collaging together ripped audio, a recollected story and a field recording, this three part audio work juxtaposes together three different modes of recall. The audio is pieced together in a kind of wondering about how sound travels through mouths and memory, through compressed, copied, and degraded files, through movements and meaning.

(1)  Recorded somewhere in the hills of Mashkey, this audio is one of the final traces of Dr. Deen Muhammad, one of the thousands disappeared in Balochistan at the hands of the Pakistani state. His daughter, renowned activist Sammi Deen Baloch writes “even today, the hills, deserts, fields and streets of Balochistan, in the echoes of your damboora, bear witness to your love”.

(2) The story of Laila and Majnun, English translation below. 

(3)  A Zikr (invocation) ritual practiced specifically in the coastal belt of Balochistan. The sounds, rhythms, language and movements of this particular tradition of Zikr are unique to this region and an expression of a long history of Indian ocean sonic exchanges. Much of the chanting and invocation is done in untranslatable amalgams of Arabic Balochi Swahili and Farsi.

Laila Majnu

There are of course 100,000 versions of this story. The story of Laila and Majnun. Laila means night and Majnun is the mad one. The story is told across South Asia, Iran, Central Asia in its many, many different forms. But this version is one that stayed with me forever. I could never forget this telling of the final encounter of Laila and Majnun, star-crossed tragic lovers torn apart by matters beyond their control, usually the conditions and conventions of hegemonic society. 

This last meeting happens in a forest of Cypress trees. Cypress trees are known for their height and for their long, seemingly immortal lifespans. In the Cypress forest Laila tells Majnun that they can never meet again and as she walks away from him he falls to his knees and calls out: Laila. Laila, Laila, Laila. From that moment on, Majnun can only speak one word, and that is the word he speaks again and again and again. Majnun has also become an Echo in love  - but in this story becoming Echo is not a fall, it is sacred, divine exaltation. 

Decades later, Laila, still in love, pining and longing, returns to the forest in search of Majnun. But she finds that the forest has changed. The once tall Cypress trees have all bent down. Just like Majnun, they kneel in prayer and all the trees in the forest echo endlessly just one word. Laila, Laila, Laila.  Laila finds her way to the exact spot where she had left Majnun decades ago, and finds there again a Cypress tree repeating her name. She asks the tree, are you Majnun? And the tree replies: No. I am Laila. 

The whole forest of trees is possessed by Majnun’s grief, and as they sound this grief together, Majnun becomes many and the forest becomes one. In the soundings of Majnun’s grief the forest learns worship, and in the echoes of the forest Majnun and his beloved both become expansive, become immortal. In the repetition of her name the memory of Laila is settled into Majnun’s bones and being and the whole forest has attuned itself to the beat of the mad one’s burning heart. 

Zahra Malkani

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research, and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice. Working across multiple media she explores the politics of development and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia: experimental and ecstatic ecopedagogies in collaboration with ongoing movements in defense of land and water in the city. 
Zahra’s work has been supported by institutions such as the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Rockbund Arts Museum. She has been awarded residencies at Academie Schloss Solitude, the Jan Van Eyck Academie, La Becque and the Rijksmuseum. Her work has circulated internationally, more recently in spaces such as KonsthallC (Stockholm), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), the V&A Museum (UK) and Colomboscope (Sri Lanka). She has published writings in journals like Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, the Journal of Architectural Education and online publications such as Against Catastrophe and Decolonial Hacker. Zahra was nominated for the Jameel Art Prize from the V&A Museum and Jameel Arts Foundation (2023), and is a recipient of the Asia Arts Gamechanger Award (2024). 

For the first sound project of 2026 on its digital exhibition platform — conceived to foreground experimentation in sound practices and to amplify unheard voices — OTO Sound Museum is pleased to present All eyes on the eyes heavier than all the gold in the world by The School of Mutants. This work is an invitation to travel through a republic that proclaims the end of empire while its poisonous light continues to travel across oceans. From the Atlantic to the Caribbean, through the Pacific, and back to Europe by way of the Indian Ocean, what is declared past remains materially and politically present. What is it that it possesses, and how does it continue to hold? The French overseas territories span the entire planet — a geopolitical reality that remains largely unknown. The School of Mutants is interested in making perceptible where these places are, and in offering slivers of who their inhabitants are, what are the things they want to remember and forget, and what are some of the riches — material, symbolic, strategic — that keep holding them on a string until now. If (neo-)colonial realities still permeate these places, we should not turn away from them. We should learn to listen before we claim to see — and look them in the eye. It is a piece woven together by stories, by poetry, by music, by protest, by memory, by friendship, and by silences. It moves between transmission and opacity, between listening and confrontation. It is a collective journey anchored in the present moment, yet oscillating between the past and the future. 

Artistic composition: Lou Mo, Valérie Osouf
Sound (editing, mix design): Romain Le Bras 
The artists would like to thank Praline Gay-Para, Wally Fall & Frank Kompè for their input. 

The School of Mutants
(Horacio Cadzco, Diane Cescutti, Hamedine Kane, Lou Mo, Valérie Osouf, Boris Raux, Stéphane Verlet Bottéro) 

The School of Mutants is an international collective of artists, researchers, and filmmakers founded in 2018 by Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet Bottéro, later joined by Lou Mo, Valérie Osouf, and Boris Raux, and subsequently by Diane Cescutti and Horacio Cadzco. Working across film, installation, performance, and writing, the collective explores mutation as a political and poetic force. Their practice engages archives, transmission, and collective learning through multisensory and situated forms. The School of Mutants develops long-term projects that question dominant narratives and modes of knowledge production. Their work has been presented internationally in biennales, art spaces, cinemas, and public events. 

Recipients of the OTO AWARD x DAR JACIR ART AND RESEARCH 2025

In 2025 OTO Sound Museum and Dar Jacir for Art and Research partnered together to establish the first Palestinian art prize dedicated to sound and listening. The 2025 prize was awarded to Dahaleez Collective, a Gaza-based research art collective whose work sits at the intersection of sound, narrative, and political memory. Dahaleez is a multifaceted sonic-arts archive, collecting field recordings, oral testimonies, and historical material to counter erasure, evoke memory, and open futures. Rooted in Gaza yet resonating globally, Dahaleez create spaces of listening that amplify collective experience.
For the OTO Award x Dar Jacir for Art and Research, Dahaleez produced a new sound piece entitled From-To which testifies and reimagines one of Gaza City’s most vital arteries, Al-Rashid Street. Intertwining past, present, and future in a multidimensional sonic narrative, the piece weaves together sonic fragments, voices, and orchestral compositions to reconstruct the collective memory of the street. The piece draws on sonic matter and reflections gathered during workshops held by Dahaleez collective in 2024-2025, where artists and cultural workers discussed the meaning and memory of the street. Original sounds from personal archives were woven together with music and symbolic sonic gestures to evoke layers of history and lived experience. At its core, the composition includes a musical piece by Mahmoud Abuwarda, originally written during the 11-day war in 2021 and later produced in 2025 with Lisbon Symphonic Orchestra. From–To becomes an auditory journey, an archive of place and time resonating between what was, what is, and what might be.

The work, conceived as a corridor through time, is accompanied by a bilingual booklet in English and Arabic, guiding listeners through the voices and narratives entwined into the piece.

From–To will soon be exhibited as an installation at Dar Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem at the end of November.

Dahaleez collective

Dahaleez is an artistic and research-based collective founded in 2021. The collective emerged from its first joint experience, “Geography of Divine Magic,” which was held at Beit Al-Ghussein Cultural Heritage House – Gaza, as part of its exploratory journey to deconstruct and understand the temporal and spatial relations of the Palestinian subject living under siege.
Between 2023 and 2024, the collective engaged with the question of the future through its project “Transcending the Possible Future,” through which it formulated its founding statement. The group has since continued working on the ongoing project “Taboo,” which is based on collective workshops that practice processes of remembrance, archiving, and documentation using diverse tools and methodologies.
In this same context, Dahaleez seeks to develop analytical and exploratory tools to understand and deconstruct the social and political influences on imagining future possibilities for liberation and reconstruction within the Palestinian context. The collective’s practice relies on collaboration and coordination with other artists through workshops, reflective gatherings, and exercises in joint production.
The founding members of the collective are: Khaled Jarada, Rehaf Batniji, Salman Nawati, Majdal Nateel, Carmel Abbasi, Mahmoud Abuwarda, and Mahmoud Al-Shaer.
The collective has further expanded its work through cultural practitioners who joined via the “Taboo” workshops, including:
Ashraf Alafifi, Alaa Kamal Al-Jaabari, Ahmed R. S. Mortaja, Ahmed Kamel Ramadan Alwakil, Bisan Natee, Sama Imad, Asem Alnabih, Fedaa Zeyad, Fidaa Najeeb Al Hassanat, and Mohamad Zaqzooq.

Kariñitos (porque duele desde el centro de la tierra) is a tender and tremulous homage to Karen Urcia, Mochica healer and cultural activist, whose affective gestures toward the ancestral whistling bottles became the central sonic material that shapes this track. The title—merging cariñitos, meaning gentle caresses, with Karen’s name—evokes a unique mode of touch that resonates far beyond the surface. These caresses, registered during the Resonaciones exhibition process at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart (2023) and ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2024–25), form the emotional and vibrational core of the composition. As Karen’s hands traced the contours of the vessels, the clay beings responded with vibration and memory—sounds captured through contact microphones and other sensors, later entangled with AI reinterpretations that are further arranged with contemporary musical instruments, synthesizers, and vocal sections for the composition. In this piece, affection is inseparable from ache: a resonance that rises from the center of the Earth, where love, loss, territorial and temporal dislocations, long-distance membranes, silence, tectonic plates, loud voids, and tactile listening converge. Emerging through an intricate and collective process, Kariñitos carries infinite reciprocities and a vibration that continues to move outward as a continuous thread between dimensions. These tactile sonic textures question the limits of our skins and the resonant membranes between worlds, temporalities, categories, and logics.
This song is part of Nicole L’Huillier’s forthcoming album Respuestas, which will be out via Buh Records (2025), thanks to the support of ifa Gallery Stuttgart and the Resonaciones exhibition project.

About Respuestas:
Respuestas is a sonic reverberation of the exhibition Resonaciones, emerging from dialogues, experiments, and collective research in a curatorial-artistic interplay. Shaped by interwoven calls and responses, the album traces its origins to the activation of displaced Moche whistling vessels—ancestral Andean technological entities that breathe through water and air— and expand through the evolving soundscape of the exhibition. The echoes of the clay beings, recorded through contact microphones and electromagnetic sensors, become entangled with sounds from planetary tremors, other environmental oscillations, sonic contributions from visitors, and AI-generated transformations and reinterpretations to form an ever-shifting sonic field. Sound here is both an open archive and a becoming—an ongoing choreography of interwoven temporalities, where the past vibrates with the present and resonates with the future. Rooted in a principle of reciprocity, Respuestas explores listening as mutual transformation, resonating across time and space in search of new sonic inquiries and resonant continuums.

Respuestas Credits: All tracks by Nicole L’Huillier
Production and Mastering by Juan Necochea
AI Systems and Experiments by Manaswi Mishra
Album design by Stoodio Santiago da Silva
The source material used for this album and its process was gathered during the exhibition Resonaciones at ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2024-25) and at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart (2023). In dialogues and resonances with Francisca Gili, Karen Urcia, Bettina Korintenberg, Carolina Arevalo, Manaswi Mishra, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Juan Necochea, Luis Muro, Botellas Silbadoras, Santiago da Silva, Linden-Museum Stuttgart, ifa Gallery Stuttgart, Bienal de Artes Mediales (Chile), Buh Records.

Nicole L’Huillier

Nicole L’Huillier (b. 1985) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has been shown at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2025), 14a Bienal do Mercosul (2025), 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Tabakalera Donostia (2025), Kunsthalle Bern (2024), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Shanghai (2023), ifa-Gallery Stuttgart (2023), Bienal de Artes Mediales Santiago (2023, 2021, 2019, 2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022), Transmediale, Berlin (2022), Ars Electronica, Linz (2022, 2019, 2018), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Santiago de Chile (2022), 6th Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg (2021), and 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2018), among others.

From May 20 to August 3, 2025, OTO SOUND MUSEUM presents Time No Longer by Anri Sala, featured for the first time in its exclusively sonic form. In its original audiovisual installation Time No Longer (2021) depicts a turntable floating in a space station, tethered only by its electric cord, still playing a vinyl record in the apparent absence of humanity. The turntable seems to spin in the aftermath of some catastrophe, serving as a reminder of absent lives. In the new OTO's presentation, the visual element disappears, shifting the focus entirely to sound and imaginative experience. The music we hear is a reimagined version of French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Written during World War II while Messiaen was imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, the quartet was performed in 1941 with three fellow prisoners, using only instruments they could find. Messiaen’s composition, one of the most poignant works created in captivity, reflects the profound isolation and despair of war but also the fragile human need to create something beautiful amid suffering. Sala was particularly moved by the quartet's solo movement, The Abyss of the Birds, written for clarinet by Messiaen’s fellow prisoner, Henri Akoka.
Sala found a haunting complement to Akoka’s clarinet in the story of Ronald McNair, one of the world’s first Black astronauts to have reached space, but also an accomplished professional saxophone player, who had planned to play and record a saxophone solo on board the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Tragically, the shuttle disintegrated seconds after take-off, killing everyone on board. Sala felt that composing a saxophone part for ‘The Abyss of the Birds’ would subtly re-envisage a piece that was never played where it was intended, and also form a duet between two instrumental voices – empathetic and interdependent through what they have endured. Emphasizing the profound loneliness of both men’s experiences, linking outer space with the confined space of incarceration, Time No Longer creates a duet that speaks of endurance, empathy, and absence.

Anri Sala

Anri Sala constructs transformative, time-based works through multiple relationships between image, architecture, and sound, employing these as elements to fold, capsize, and question experience. His works investigate ruptures in language, syntax, and music, inviting creative dislocations, which generate new interpretations of history, supplanting old fictions and narratives with less-explicit, more-nuanced dialogues.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions atBourse de Commerce, Paris (2023); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2021); Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston (2021); Centro Botìn, Santander (2019); Mudam, Luxembourg (2019); the Castello di RivoliMuseo d’ArteContemporanea, Turin (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017); the New Museum, New York (2016); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012);Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2008);and ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004). He has also participated inmajor group exhibitions and biennials internationally, including the57thVenice Biennale (2017), dOCUMENTA(13) (2012), the29thSão Paulo Biennial (2010) and the4th BerlinBiennale (2006). In 2013, he represented France in the55th Venice Biennale.

CL/FF1 > CHAOS LINGUISTICS / FREQUENCY FOCUS 1 
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES SONIFICATION AND HUMAN SOUNDSCAPES

Chaos linguistics is a research project born in 2023 as an exploration of collective frequencies, acoustic metallurgy, and connective resources. Chaos Linguistics intercepts the phenomenon of unisono, conceived as the sound of human interaction through language in relation to space, similar to how gravitational waves are detected by an interferometer. In this view, human sound occupies the ether and yet remains an intangible space. The research explores compositional processes that can give rise to electroacoustic works capable of contemplating and representing this phenomenon. CL/FF1 runs the second experimental composition born in the frame of Chaos Linguistics, created specifically for OTO SOUND MUSEUM. This project bridges two aspects related to discovery, the sonification of gravitational waves and the spectral nuances of human soundscapes.  Inspired by the detection methods of EGO-Virgo interferometer (Pisa, IT) and the ephemeral qualities of language as a collective phenomenon, the work proposes a generative composition. By drawing from both astrophysics and human cultures, CL/FF1 transcends traditional narrative structures, immersing audiences in a multisensory experience that blurs the boundaries between tangible and intangible, past and present, harmony and chaos. This interplay, at the level of sonic perception, draws parallels between the propagation of gravitational waves and the continuous generation of human sound, keeping interference as the core space for interaction.

TEAM 

Oli Bonzanigo is an artist and researcher focused on site-specific operations, socio-acoustic landscapes and  linguistic crossroads. She participated in various residency programs and exhibitions worldwide and developed projects for museums,  foundations, biennales, galleries, production sites, cultural programs, public institutions and collectives. Her practice dismantles and reconstructs zones of human interaction through associative scenarios and time warps. The immersive installations seek to decode the subtle anatomies of social mechanics and their metamorphic traditions, with a particular attention to contact zones, narrative trades and communication systems. With the Saharan region as a treasured muse, her inquiry moves through immaterial and mobile constructs such as  sound culture, linguistic architectures and cross-geographical matrices. Through a long experience in metallurgical production and research, material investigation integrates the linguistics  of frequency behavior, exploring the sensorial impacts and potential translations of acoustic waves into known and  unknown matter, rendered into spatial and participative experiences. 

Edoardo Cordero works in the fields of digital audio, sound engineering and electronics engineering. After completing his studies in electronics engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin he pursued his desire to apply the acquired skills to digital audio signal processing and spatial audio, with an approach to creation purely based on intuition, experience and pragmatic design. In the summer of 2023 he began collaborating with Spæs Lab Berlin. He currently works as a high school teacher in electronics while being active as a musician, developer and sound tech consultant.

Allaeldene Ilou is a researcher specializing in media, with a major focus on sound. His research is grounded in both empirical inquiry and professional experience. He seeks to craft approaches to media and contextualize information by integrating interdisciplinary perspectives blending media and the humanities. As a co-founder of HCM, he pursues research exploring the intricate relationships between sound and image in audiovisual installations, film, television, and theatre. He also collaborates with Cashmere Radio, curating the program Zaafran Caravan. For seven years, he worked as operations manager with the Moroccan orchestra known as Master Musicians of Joujouka.

Trois Martinets is a variation in three sequences of the melody "Le retour des Martinets," composed by artist Christophe Burgess for the OTO Award 2024, which is dedicated to young artists of EDHEA (Sierre). Part of the heritage of the Martigny bell tower, located in the Rhône Valley south of the Swiss Alps, this composition was passed down to Burgess with no knowledge of its author or origin. Since this year, Burgess has served as the titular carillonneur – one of the fewer than 30 people in the area skilled in playing the bell tower’s mechanism – and this is the first melody he has been asked to learn.The first sequence is a montage of the melody played by Burgess himself from the bell tower. The second, however, is a contemporary, experimental adaptation of the melody that seems to de-catholicize it. This middle sequence was recorded in the autumn of 2024 during live performances of “Carillon Sauvage,” a sculptural and sonic instrument created by Burgess to replicate the Martigny bell tower’s sound electronically, extending it beyond the confines of the tower. This adaption also contributes to the deculturalization of bell-ringing while fostering a new form of spirituality. The last sequence features a 1970s recording of the bell tower’s former carillonneur, Robert Terrettaz, performing the same tune.
The composition is shaped by a time-dilated presence, blending the sounds of the surrounding landscape into the work. From the persistent hum of the city and the mechanical noise of his new instrument, to the distant whir of a helicopter, the carillon of Martigny has remained unchanged for centuries, even as its sonic environment has continually evolved. With the purpose of interrogating this dual state, withTrois Martinets Burgess seeks to contribute to the development of Alpine Punk, a science-fiction sub-genre focused on the social, environmental, and spiritual concerns of the Alpine region. 

Recording credit : Beat Jaggy / Claire Frachebourg / Christophe Burgess / Gérard Leiggener
Photo credit: FINIStud for Carillon Sauvage
Anaël Antille for the portrait photo

Christophe Burgess

(b. 1989, Switzerland) After his theater training at the Haute École des Teintureries in Lausanne, Christophe Burgess continued his Master’s training at EDHEA in Sierre (École de design et haute école d’art du Valais). Since 2019, he has designed and staged several immersive shows, including Homo Solaris (current collective la Nef), Brainwaves (RGB Project), SorcyerXes (collective A La Source) and Connecté (Yann Lambiel). Since 2024, he has ventured into sound creation with Carillon Sauvage. Seeking to create new narratives that allow us to project ourselves into a desirable future, he explores the possibilities of transformation between Alpine heritage and new technologies. He is currently developing a new science-fiction narrative framework: Alpine Punk. The three projects Carillon Sauvage, Les Enfants du Rhône and Alpine Chaos are all part of the same artistic research.

Untitled (servees) is an audio work located at Bab il Amoud (Damascus Gate) which stands at the start of the road leading to Nablus and onward to Damascus. Once a massive hub of the main regional transport network of serveeses (communal taxis), it had direct links to Beirut, Amman, Baghdad, Kuwait as well as every urban Palestinian center such as Lyd, Jaffa, Ramallah, Nablus, Gaza, Ramle. Damascus Gate was the point where servees drivers used to pick up customers by calling out the names of their various destinations. Untitled (servees) recalls that purpose and the once fluid space of movement, connection and exchange and attempts to make visible the fractures and interactions of everyday life within the disintegrating urban landscape. Calling out cities servees drivers recall their destinations.
This audio work is a part of an ongoing long-term research, which explores and investigates the disappearing transportation network in Palestine and its implications on the physical and social experience of space. This is a result of the ongoing fragmentation and continued destruction of the urban landscape by the Israeli Occupation.
This audio work was a Public Sound Intervention installed at Bab il Amoud, Jerusalem in 2008 and commissioned by Al-Ma'mal Foundation, Jerusalem.

Emily Jacir

As poetic as it is political and biographical, Emily Jacir’s work investigates silenced histories, exchange, translation, transformation, and resistance. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures and in-depth research. She investigates personal and collective movement through time and space and its implications on the physical and social experience. Drawing on rituals such as dances, processions and games, the artist charts the way space, collectivity, and memories are claimed. Jacir has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and is deeply invested in creating alternative spaces for knowledge production internationally. She has been honored for her work internationally, including an honorary doctorate from NCAD in Dublin, Ireland (2023); an American Academy of Arts andLetters prize (2023); the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome(2015); and the Alpert Award (2011); Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Golden Lion, Venice Biennale (2007). She is the founder of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.

—active because it leaks is a sound work that operates when all available windows of a space are continuously open. The opening of the windows allows sound to spill in and out, becoming an environmental circumstance for the making of the work. —active because it leaks takes its title from Anne Carson's handling of the cinematic method of temps morts (dead time). Ostensibly a documentary technique, yet held within a fictional frame, the temps morts unfolds when a film camera runs on a scene long after the actors have finished acting so that which is unguarded, erratic, or erroneous spills into the frame. Actors' corpse, fall out of character , something rustles around in an empty doorway. Capturing everyday pedestrian activity, foregrounding that which is typically edited out, the cinematic performance cracks. 
For the digital exhibition with OTO SOUND MUSEUM Spooner presents the documentation of  —active because it leaks, from its installation at ZERO… Milano in September 2022, during the solo show "Two Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy-Four Seconds Wide". Also presented as a part of the installation was DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm Up), a work in which a cello meets a building — and anything that happens to be in between them. Snatches of a phone call, a pickup truck beeping, a baby crying, and the road outside become sonic visitations that spill into the gallery, via —active because it leaks, then intertwine with the sound of DEAD TIME (Melody's Warm Up), an unedited sound recording in which a cellist tries to find her "tone," colliding with an intermittent digital timer that ‘beeps’ harshly at regular intervals. Thus, in this documentation, the sound of a cello flows into the soundscape outside the open window, establishing a threshold between the internal and external that blurs into a continuous encounter of incidental listening.

Cally Spooner

(b. 1983, UK) is a British-Italian artist and a writer, whose choreographies unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Graham Foundation, Chicago (2024); Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2023); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (2021), Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London (2020); the Art Institute of Chicago (2019); the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2018); the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016). Her live productions, plays and events have been staged at, amongst others, The Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Museum M, Leuven (2018); The High Line, New York (2015); Tate Britain and Tate Modern London (2014); Performa 13, New York  (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (2012).
Spooner is the author of recent monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2024); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slimvolume/Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella, Collapsing in Parts, was published by Mousse in 2012.  Her series of five essays on “performance”, A Hypothesis of Resistance, will be published as a monographic text book by Mousse, Milano in 2024. In each essay Spooner holds and examines temporalities which defy and eclipse the standardizations that drive individual and societal bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future. Beginning with “On Asynchronicity”* then extending to “Rehearsal,” “The Present Tense,” “Undetectability,” and “Duration,” A Hypothesis of Resistance is edited and typeset by Will Holder.

Both day and night, for 2375 hours from October 26, 2018, to January 30, 2019, over a thousand pastors and ministers from various churches and denominations worldwide alternated in celebrating an uninterrupted worship service in The Hague. Thanks to a Dutch law prohibiting authorities from interrupting a religious rite, this service provided the time and space necessary to shield the Tamrazyan family within the Bethel Chapel from an executive order to expel them from the country. This powerful act of civil disobedience performed by the Bethel community succeeded in inhabiting the intermediate spaces of the law and expanding them to create an exceptional time and space outside the State. Simultaneously, it initiated a dialogue with the government, leading to a review of the case and ultimately renewing the residence permit for the Tamrazyan family and around 700 other families in similar situations. As a possible continuation of this exceptional condition of immunity created by the over three-month-long ritual, artist Margherita Moscardini has realised Bethel Chapel’s Annex (2023), a 500-square-metre sculpture in the form of a carpet exhibited as the first mobile annex of the Chapel, a protection surface that can be unfolded and used as a grounding for the ritual celebration in support of the human beings who need its activation. Derived from Bethel Chapel’s Annex, the work Anywhere and Anytime (2023-2024) is a sonic composition that autonomously disseminates through OTO SOUND MUSEUM. It echoes the voices of some of the participants from the religious rite: they are men and women who occupied a 'here and now', generating a performative action consisting of the alliance of bodies, voices, and sounds emitted by the more than one thousand people who took turns in the uninterrupted celebration of the ritual. In order to illuminate this action, Moscardini asked them to intimately pronounce the words 'here and now', with the desire to reinforce the spatiotemporal essence of the rite and underscore the urgency of protecting people globally and legally on the basis of their right to move, rather than on the basis of territorial belonging and blood ties. The sum of their contributions - the totality of the 'here and now' pronounced freely in English and Flemish - seems to resonate as an auspice, where the repetition of such an event can become a rule and no longer just the exception in a dominant system, spreading 'anywhere and anytime’.

The project was created in collaboration with Derk Stegeman, minister of the Protestant Church of The Hague (NL); Bethel Chapel, The Hague (NL), STEK, The Hague (NL) and Theo Hettema, minister and at the time chair person of the Protestant Church of the Hague. It was exhibited for the first time in 2023 on the occasion of the exhibition The Continuous Service, organised within the Gian Marco Casini Gallery in Livorno.

Margherita Moscardini

(b. 1981, Italy) is an artist who, through different means, seeks to generate sculptures understood both as objects and as walkable places that are legally differentiated from the sovereignty of the land they occupy. For the past few years, her practice has been trying to become a tool for imagining forms of inhabiting and citizenship finally freed from territorial belonging and the bod of blood. Her works include: Istanbul City Hills_On the Natural History of Dispersion and States of Aggregation (2013-2014), a mixed-media work in which Istanbul's recent urban transformation is told through the glass disposal system; 1XUNKNOWN, to Fortress Europe with Love (2012-2018), a series of 21 short videos that narrate the remains of the Atlantic Wall defense line: 15. 000 bunkers built by the Third Reich along Europe's Atlantic coast, from the Pyrenees to Norway, with the aim of defending "Fortress Europe"; The Fountains of Za'atari (2016 - ongoing), whose main purpose is to reproduce in Europe the courtyards with fountains built within the Za'atari refugee camp (Jordan), in the form of public sculptures legally regulated as common resources that cannot be subject to the sovereignty of any state. 

Sounds of Disarm is the sound work of artist Pedro Reyes composed on the occasion of his sound exhibition at OTO SOUND MUSEUM platform in 2023. Starting in 2007, the artist initiated the practice of 'disarm' by transforming more than 1500 guns from Mexico into shovels ready to be used for digging and planting trees. Through the casting of 1527 guns - which are thus taken off the market - 1500 trees are in fact planted. This first work entitled 'Palas por Pistolas', still ongoing, immediately triggers that generative process capable of manipulating the function of an object, of changing its polarities and shaping its semantics: 'an instrument of death becomes an instrument of life'. An object of violence is converted into its opposite, through a process of re-signification and re-invention that passes through the transmutation of matter and its symbolic conversion. In a short time, the artist manages to collect over 7000 weapons that are donated to him and that he decides this time to transform into musical instruments - 'disarming instruments' as Reyes calls them. From the weapons come string instruments, air instruments, percussion instruments, later played all over the world by musicians and performers who also compose dedicated scores, who measure themselves with the material and its unexpected musicality, used on occasions of the March for our Lives and non-violence demonstrations, often also made to resonate through orchestrated mechanical automation. A gun can no longer kill but, on the contrary, generate sound matter. Sounds of Disarm (2023) originates from the elaboration of a part of the artist's archive composed of sound tracks, recordings and audio documentation related to the practice of disarming, collected over several years and in multiple geographies. The voice of Pedro Reyes takes us inside this sonic journey, which moves between Mexico, Turkey, South Korea and the United States. Like an exceptional narrator – in the wake of those who introduce each track in recorded classical music – he intimately recounts each musical sample, restoring the socio-political contexts, imaginaries and chronicle events, and at the same time delivering a powerful message, a ‘call to disarm’ to which each of us is asked to react.

Pedro Reyes

(b. 1972, Mexico City) works on large-scale projects that address current social and political issues. Through a varied practice utilising sculpture, performance, video, and activism, Reyes explores the power of individual and collective organisation to incite change through communication, creativity, happiness, and humour. A socio-political critique of contemporary gun culture is addressed in Reyes’s ongoing Palas por Pistolas. Similarly, in Reyes’ major continuing Disarm series, firearms confiscated by the Mexican government and donated to Reyes have been transformed into instruments, which are then activated by local musicians. Issues of community and compassion are addressed in Sanatorium, activated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2011), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2013) and at The Power Plant in Toronto and The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (2014). In this work, visitors are invited to sign up for a ‘temporary clinic,’ with the mission of treating various kinds of urban malaise. His immersive exhibition Doomocracy, organised by Creative Time at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, was a ‘political house of horrors’ marking the confluence of two events haunting the American cultural imagination at the time: Halloween and the 2016 US presidential election. Most recently, Reyes has worked with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and ICAN to stage anti-nuclear protests and performances across the world. Titled, Amnesia Atómica ZERO NUKES, this movement has found platforms in New York; Mexico City; Vienna and Oslo. Reyes lives and works in Mexico City. He studied architecture at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. Solo exhibitions have been held with SITE Santa Fe, NM, USA (2023); MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico (2022); MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal (2021); Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2020); SCAD, Georgia, USA (2019); Creative Time, New York, USA (2016); Dallas Contemporary, TX, USA (2016); La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2015); ICA, Miami, FL, USA (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (2011); Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2011); CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (2009); Bass Museum, Miami, FL, USA (2008;) and San Francisco Art Institute, CA, USA (2008). Reyes has participated in group exhibitions at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2015); The National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI), Rome (2015); Beijing Biennale, China (2014); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); Liverpool Biennial, UK (2012); Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2012); Lyon Biennale, France (2009); and the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). In Fall 2016, Reyes served as the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Act of Touch - A Resonance of World's Ends weaves together audio materials collected with the eyes and ears of artists around the world in 24 hours. As a witness to the shifting dynamics of the world, this sonic correspondence deciphers the echoes that define the essence of a single day in history— 31 March, 2022, one month after the onset of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. A Resonance of World's Ends is a sonic fragment connecting the disparate threads of our global narrative. It represents one of the artist’s perspectives of the world's song—a sonic postcard with the backdrop of the current heart-wrenching humanitarian crisis in Palestine and the haunting echoes of Gaza. This sonic postcard tells a story for a collective listening, underscoring the importance of bearing witness to the entire spectrum of our world, considering the unheard, the invisible, and the in-between.The Act of Touch project was initiated by the artist in correspondence with the global COVID-19 pandemic with collective video recordings for 24 hours on 31 March 2020. It has evolved into a global ritual of togetherness, an ongoing endeavor that reveals the intricate interplay between history and the collective human memory in the face of global events that redefine the world as we know it.

Recordings by Alexander Cigana, Amanda Kerdahi, Anya Kravchenko, Christine Kazaryan with Denis Sorokin (cornet) and Andrei Popovskiy, Georgia Lottin, Kai Simon, Karen Keyrouz, Lukas Zerbst, Mariagrazia Pontorno, Nina Baratti, Nour Hifaoui, Raymond Gemayel, Rita Hajj, Romeu Silveira, Shoko Yamamura, Steve Stevensito,Teresa Soldini, Victor Abbey-hart, and Shatha Al-Deghady, as part of The Act of Touch project.

The artist Shatha Afify was selected by Zaira Oram from among the artists studying in the Public Art master's degree at EDHEA (CH).

Shatha Al-Deghady

(b. 1987, Egypt), also known as Shatha Afify, is an interdisciplinary artist committed to exploring diverse artistic mediums such as sound, performance, and sculpture. She pursued a Master's degree in art in Public Spheres at EDHEA, building on her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Cairo 2009, and participating in specialized programs, like the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in 2021. Shatha's focus shifted significantly in 2012 in response to the Egyptian revolution of 2011, exploring themes related to the role of psychology in shaping perception and truth, power dynamics, and self-liberation in the journey towards freedom, exemplified in her early artwork "Dare to Doubt." Shatha's art serves as a form of covert rebellion against socio-political constraints and has been featured in various exhibitions, delving into themes such as the enduring power of resistance, the resilience of the human spirit, and the interplay between absence and presence, as seen in her recent project "A Rebel’s Loving Heart in Three States." Shatha has been part of artist residencies, such as the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2020, and has received awards like the Mill's Beauty Reality Salon in Brussels in 2021. She actively contributes to the art community as an artist, educator, project coordinator, and is involved in curatorial practices, remaining dedicated to artistic experimentation and collaboration with fellow artists. She continues to explore intricate themes related to the human body, voice, language, and power struggles.

beware! beware! anthropocene is on air is a new work by Russian artist Ivan Kurbakov. On the occasion of the KLANG MOOR SCHOPFE festival (Gais, CH), Zaira Oram invited the artists Ivan Kurbakov and Axel Crettenand to realize a site specific installation inside one of the wooden farm houses located in the countryside of the village in Appenzell. In this context, the two authors developed a common project entitled DOOM DOOM DOOM (notes from the planetary garden) dedicated to the natural frame and the old structure.

Ivan Kurbakov's sound piece beware! beware! anthropocene is on air is a spontaneous evolution of the sound research that accompanied the conception of the installation in the small rural house. For this composition, the artist asked several people of different ages to freely recite book titles from the library dedicated to the theme of the end of the world and the apocalypse conceived by Axel Crettenand. The reading – imagined and developed through a collaborative practice by both artists questioning the environmental problem and human knowledge – is introduced by a composition based on Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” and concluded by one based on a poem "Darkness" of Lord Byron. Both poems were published in 1816, the so-called year without a summer because of the deadly consequences of the eruption in Indonesia. The voices are finally elaborated into multi-layered compositions with sounds and field recordings of several natural phenomena such as erupting volcanoes, melting glaciers and storms collected by the artist. The words, rasped and spoken by the present generation, become a call and testimony of reactions-emotions that transpire through the use of voice. Like a beacon in the dark that intermittently illuminates, the voices of beware! beware! anthropocene is on air allow feelings of failure and hope to shine through.

Ivan Kurbakov 

(b. 1989, Moscow) is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied creative writing at the Literature Institute of Moscow and film directing at the Moscow School of New Cinema from which he graduated in 2016 with the film «Pleroma». Ivan Kurbakov has been active as a solo musician and sound-artist since 2010. A number of tapes and CDs under the name mpala garoo and Ian Kubra were published between 2010 and 2020 on labels such as Sweat Lodge Guru (USA), Digitalis (USA), Aguirre Records (Belgium) and Shimmering moods records (Netherlands). In 2020 Kurbakov co-founded an art magazine dedicated to the symbiosis of arts with which he became a laureate of Garage.Digital 2021 program. Screenings, exhibitions and performances were held at Madame Claude (2010, mpala garoo), FIDMarseille 2017 («Pleroma»), Iragui Gallery («9 paintings vaya adelante», 2020, Fabula Gallery («Mirrored music», 2019), Solyanka Gallery («Compositional map for a singing way», 2019), New Space of Nations Theatre (video installation «Things and directions», 2017), Platforms Athens, Electrotheatre, Gallery of Experimental sound and others. In 2021 he made the documentary film Umbilical cord, an introduction interviewing young Russian teenagers about the pandemic and the possible futures. Currently working on a full-length feature of the above mentioned film.

Sorgul (Red Rose) is a collective song executed by a group of women that returns the story of the persecution of the Kurdish Yazidi community. The title of the song, which is a recognizable lament in traditional Kurdish culture – a clear reminder of the harshness and need to feel pain – owes its name to a woman called 'Sorgul'. Mistakenly perceived as a love song, Sorgul (Red rose) instead describes the massacre of a community and leaves a trace, through the expression of the voice, of a recent history little told and disseminated due to censorship exercised by regimes and political control. The song, which is also a symbolic and physical process of resistance and liberation, is a shared oral heritage that is consigned to the present after having been handed down, from generation to generation and from language to language, by the women of the community. Sorgul (Red Rose) disseminates a language that is still forbidden in the countries of origin.

The team of the OTO SOUND MUSEUM supported artist Zehra Doğan and her artistic-activist practice through her sound project Sorgul (Red Rose), which in turn aims to support the people of the Kurdish community affected by the earthquake (2023).

Zehra Doğan

(b. 1989, Turkey) is a Kurdish artist and journalist. She graduated at the Dicle University’s Fine Arts Programme and is the co-founder of JINHA, the first all-women press agency. During the war in Iraq and Syria, she reported from both fronts and was one of the first journalists to give account of the Êzidî women who were enslaved by ISIS in Northern Iraq. During the conflicts in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Doğan tried to report from Cizre and Nusaybin. In July 2016, the day after she left Nusaybin, Zehra Doğan was incarcerated in Mardin. Following a trial, in March 2017 she was sentenced to 2 years, 9 months and 22 days under the charge of “terrorist propaganda” based on the articles she had written and a digital drawing depicting the destruction of Nusaybin by the Turkish army. Over the years Zehra Doğan has been awarded several prizes, including the Carol Rama Prize (2020), Exceptional Courage in Journalism Award from the May Chidiac Foundation (2019), the Freedom of Expression Award in the Arts category from Index on Censorship (2019), the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (2018), the Rebellion’s Artist in the World Prize (2017), the Freethinker Prize from the Swiss Association of Free Thinkers, Frei Denken (2017) and the Metin Göktepe Journalism Award (2015). As an artist and writer, she lives and works in Europe in “nomadic” mode. 

Various vibrating materials is a sound work edited by Zimoun in 2020 and based on various microscopic recordings of different materials which have been set under vibration, collected and processed by the artist to build a new composition. The work has no narrative but it can be listened as a 'situation', a 'moment' or a 'space'. It is characterized by an organic and primordial sound, like a burning fire or a blowing wind. A soundscape that moves away from its real mechanical and technological nature to solicit the mind's eye, the imagination. The piece is made up of imperceptible changes, slow variations that can be perceived as the changes in natural light that settles on a sculpture and gradually changes as the day goes by. With every slight variation that occurs within the microstructures of the work and its psychoacoustic elements, even our perception delicately migrates.
Various vibrating material was set up in loop.

Zimoun

(b. 1977, Switzerland) lives and works in Bern. Zimoun is known for his installative, generally site-specific, immersive works. He employs mechanical principles of rotation and oscillation to put materials into motion and thus produce sounds. For this he principally uses simple materials from everyday life and industrial usage, such as cardboard, DC motors, cables, welding wire, wooden spars or ventilators. For his works Zimoun develops small apparatuses which, despite their fundamental simplicity, generate a tonal and visual complexity once activated – particularly when a large number of such mechanical contraptions, generally hundreds of them, are united and orchestrated in installations and sculptures. Zimoun’s works continually embrace oppositional positions, such as the principles of order and chaos. In addition to his installative compositions, he also develops purely acoustic works. His work has been presented internationally. Recent displays of his work include exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery London; Museum of Contemporary Art MAC Santiago de Chile; Nam June Paik Art Museum Seoul; Kuandu Museum Taipei; Art Museum Reina Sofia Madrid; Ringling Museum of Art Florida; Mumbai City Museum; National Art Museum Beijing; LAC Museum Lugano; Seoul Museum of Art; Museum MIS São Paulo; Muxin Art Museum Wuzhen; Kunsthalle Bern; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Le Centquatre Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan; Museum of Fine Arts MBAL; Kunstmuseum Bern; Museum Collection Lambert Avignon; among others.

The URBAN SOUND series gathers works realized through the recording and editing of sound collections. The sixth version Gripia City (2021) comes from the collection of street musicians’ recordings started in Paris in 2012. Each single recording captures a melody and also returns the surrounding soundscape – the frenetic footsteps of passengers, horns, rails, voices – giving life to a portrait of specific temporality and spatiality. Like in a walk in the city, the work evolves over the time of a journey among the different metro lines and the street melodies played by musicians from East to West of the world. Gripia City retraces 2020, also translating class struggles, the daily frenzy and the health dramas, shedding light on those invisible and atonic sounds that continue to fill spaces of transient sociability. Between pauses and movements, even the strikes against the labor reform and the manifestations of the French feminist group and of the European act of Black Lives Matter participate in drawing the portrait of a recent Paris and its social and political complexity, that still lives in the public space and appears already distant from today. Animated by the ephemeral, the work lives in the condition of invisibility and, paradoxically, highlights the a-sonority of the underground musical performances.

Luca Resta

(b. 1982, Italy) lives and works in Paris. Luca Resta is a visual artist; his research questions the concept of "repetition" conceived as a phenomenon that characterizes our society. The ontological value of repetition is investigated in all his works in relation to contemporary dynamics. The act of collecting characterizes his production and becomes a fully-rounded aspect of his artistic practice. His collections are made up of everyday objects that are often "disposable", a trace of the consumerism that still defines our present, and also of sounds that he collects in urban contexts and archives as unheard acoustic details that he lets emerge from the chaotic ensemble of our cities. Among the national and international group and solo exhibitions: Inaugural Exhibit, Art Raw Gallery, New York (2009), Quali Cose Siamo, Triennale Design Museum, Milan (2010), State Of The Arts, 54° Venice Biennale (2011), Chambre Quatrevinghtcinq, Ars + L, Bergamo (2013), Calcio D’inizio, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014), Do Disturb #2, Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2016), Talent Prize, Macro, Rome (2017), It Happens, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence (2018), Depiction Of Nature And Society, Galerie Italienne, Paris (2019).

Mestiza y Migrante CumbiaMix is a declaration of intent by Paloma Ayala in collaboration with Elimix. It is an invitation to retrace every gesture and to rethink the mobile tradition and culture that we carry in our hands in every migration. Behind this work are several female figures, mainly mothers and artists. Resistant and strong, working women. Zurich-based Mexican artist Paloma Ayala is the creator of this journey into Mestiza cuisine, the cuisine of traditional dishes mixed with contemporary circumstances. Cumbia is a popular form of entertainment in the Latin communities living in the USA. A sound form that contains a great ingredient of belonging and empowerment. This Cumbia is a gift from women to other women. An invitation to believe in the importance of one's role. A voice to defend ourselves against all violence.

Paloma Ayala

(b. 1980, Matamoros, Mexico) is a visual artist interested in empowering the relationship between domestic living strategies and political contexts. She is a diaspora mother and a mestiza daughter whose work fictionalizes historical, ecological or social problematics as means of analysis and critique. Paloma´s projects nourish visions of connection and dreams of emancipation. Her favorite spaces to work range from kitchen to river shore, from international crossing bridge to agricultural land, from community meeting to aquelarre. Paloma’s work is rooted in her home, the eastern US/MX border landscapes, simultaneously blooming in her current base in Zurich.

In 2020 artist Jo Thomas spent time in North Wales UK crossing the landscapes of the highest point of Anglesey in the rotating wind farm Trysglwyn Fawr. Here she met vast areas of countryside and fields inhabited only by giant Turbine windmills that constantly work to produce electricity thanks to the airstreams. Those places, which hint at limited human presence, are privileged for the passage of the wind, captured and transformed by the Turbine windmills who dance elegantly in the landscape. Their sound, recorded by the artist through a binaural microphone, returns a remote and inaccessible motion making us perceive their mechanical and metaphysical functioning with the infinite time through which they produce clean energy. By elaborating the composition Massive Angels (2021), Jo Thomas turns to the invisible and sonorous electricity; she urges our gaze to imagine and get closer to what would otherwise be inaccessible. To reach the hidden beauty of these white supernatural presences, we must close our eyes and listen to their extraordinary linguistic code: a sort of sound message in "Enochian", the language of angels.

Jo Thomas

(b. 1972, UK) lives and works in London. Jo Thomas works as composer and sound artist. She has worked on public commissions, concerts, galleries, sound walks, privately commissioned work. In her process, she works with electronic sound working mostly with glitch, with fine detail. In 2012 Jo Thomas won the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Digital Musics and Sound Art with the work Crystal Sounds of a Synchrotron. Her work has been performed in public spaces across the world and is released by the label Entr’acte, Holiday Records Naxos, NMC Recordings, The Tapeworm and Soft Apple. She has written for Vinyl and CD, bespoke instruments and has worked on a combination of experimental work. Recent works include the project Ports of Call, The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place (2019), A Sketch of Nature, site-specific work for a multi-faith chapel in the New Grange Hospital, Cwmbran (2020-21) and In a still place Digital commission based on the sculptural sound installation Speaking Tubes, IOU Theatre, Halifax (2020). Jo currently runs a sound walking project in North London with her label Soft Apple.

Jurczok 1001 is a Zurich-based singer, beatboxer and spoken word artist who has been collaborating with writer and musician Melinda Nadj Abonji since 1998. The duo have created their own idiosyncratic sonic universe using three elements – voice, human beatbox and electric violin; exemplified in their CD Voice / Beatbox / Violin (Masterplanet, out of print) released in 2006. Having spent a few weeks in his archive, digging out unreleased recordings to assemble an album of fragments for the OTO Sound Museum, Jurczok 1001 has compiled a compositional mix of 15 tracks.
The sketches have stayed in their original forms and have never been worked on further; they had remained unemployed – as if they had been waiting for this moment.
Most of the pieces are improvisations – single takes with a loop sampler and a delay pedal. All the pieces came into being during sessions and were recorded on impulse: We gotta get this on tape! Hold the mic in your right hand and press record with your left.
Apart from one live concert and one studio session, these are recordings made during rehearsal – on MiniDisc, tape, DAT or with a Zoom H4 recorder. The LoFi is part of the aesthetic and speaks about the time.
The unfinished character, rawness and spontaneity make these pieces what they are. More importantly recognizing that some things get better when they’re left in the archive for a few years. The rough draft can be the final version.
Melinda Nadj Abonji: voice, lyrics, electric violin, octave and delay pedals, kazoo Jurczok 1001: human beatbox, voice, lyrics, JamMan loop sampler.

Jurczok 1001

(b. 1974, CH) lives and works in Zurich. Jurczok 1001 is a spoken word artist, singer, human beatbox and performer. He has performed under this name since 1996 and is among Switzerland’s spoken word pioneers. He is best known for his Spoken Beats format, a virtuoso mix of spoken word, vocals and live looping that he has performed in a variety of international venues. He has appeared among other places at the Tata literature live! Festival in Mumbai, at the Berlin Poetry Festival, at the woerdz Festival in Lucerne, at Moscow’s Electrotheatre, at the Street Art Museum St. Petersburg, at the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts in Philadelphia, at the Elevate Festival Graz, at Deutsches Haus New York and at the Solothurner Literaturtage. He has released two EPs and three singles. His most recent publications are Spoken Beats (Edition Patrick Frey, 2018), a collection of his spoken word texts from the last ten years, and the single Chumm, mi schlafed (Masterplanet, 2017). In 2020 he received an artist’s grant from the Landis & Gyr Foundation.

The artist and composer Magda Drozd presents the sound work Preludes for the Post-Normal (2021), a composition made up of 13 different preludes, short pieces known mostly from classical music that become here sound images. Better recognized as intros in the contemporary pop musical contest, preludes do not have a rigid compositional structure and can take a wide array of forms. The work, whose sounds were entirely recorded and composed during this time by the artist, evokes different directions and emotional states. It suggests to us the opportunity of imagining multiple possible beginnings which, in turn, allow us to foresee or invent as many imaginable futures: suspended projections that open gazes in the evolution of time. Preludes for the Post-Normal is indeed a journey through sound visions that invite to enter in different spaces and get projections that call to an elsewhere and suddenly vanish. The work, presented for the first time in OTO SOUND MUSEUM, is made up of different atmospheres and rhythms through organic and metallic sounds, noises collected in nature or the private space, violins, percussion, voices, birds. These preludes can reflect the time we are currently in and, through their suspense character and playing with the concept of ‘post-normality’, leave space for speculation and invention.

Magda Drozd

(b. 1987, Poland) lives and works in Zurich. Her practice explores acoustic ecologies and a non-rational perception of the world through sound. Songs for Plants, her debut album, was released in 2019 by Präsens Editionen and has reached a broad international audience of experimental music experts and fans. On her second album called "18 Floors" which she published in 2021, Drozd focused on the building she called home for several years. Within Switzerland her installations and performances were shown at Shedhalle Zürich, Helmhaus, Lokal 14, Fabriktheater Rote Fabrik, sic! Raum für Kunst, Haus Konstruktiv, Südpol and Nationalpark Zernez among others. Internationally she presented her work in art spaces in Detroit, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Trivero, and Trento. Since 2021 Drozd collaborates as a composer with Torino-based artist Laura Pugno for her video works and installations. Magda Drozd has earned her BA in Dramaturgy and MA in Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts where she has been a research fellow since 2019 and teaching sound and listening as a form of knowledge creation.

PASSI is a walkable mirrored surface, a site specific work by the artist Alfredo Pirri. It is a lake of mirrors that reflects, expands space, and disorients to seek a new orientation. It distorts and overturns reality to offer new perspectives of observation thanks to a vital process that feeds on the steps of those who cross this border made of reality and illusion. Each step defines a transformation of space and the reflected image, which is shattered, millesimated and finally pulverized with the passage of time. As outcome of a collective and individual action, the break determines the spatial perception and simultaneously becomes our sign of existence. PASSI 13"36' is the sound work presented in OTO SOUND MUSEUM realized by Polisonum, who collected and composed the sound given by the action of the breaking of the steps generated on the work of Pirri. The composition is the result of a dramaturgy that returns the portrait of experience, movement, passage. Made up of unpredictable acoustic signs, creaks, crunches, crackles and rhythmic accents, the sonority of PASSI 13"36' becomes the restitution of a threshold as tangible as it is interior: that border between the real and the apparent that we are invited here to tread, twist and overcome through sound.
The work PASSI 13"36' – also recorded on vinyl in a limited edition as result of the collaboration between Alfredo Pirri and Polisonum – was created in 2019 at Palazzo Altemps in Rome where Pirri's work was set up under a sixteenth-century loggia.

Polisonum (Filippo Lilli, Donato Loforese)

is an artistic collective using sound as a method and device of investigation to explore processes and metamorphoses linked to the present time. It is characterized by a research-based approach directed at listening to and interpreting the spaces in which it operates through sound installations and performative acts in strong dialogue with visual languages. Thanks to its hybrid identity, Polisonum realizes projects that feed on a practice of study and analysis in relation to other fields of knowledge. Polisonum's work has been shown in several institutions and festivals, among others: Una boccata d'arte (AV), Fondazione Volume (RM), Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (CH), Palazzo Altemps (RM), Palazzo Pallavicini (BO), Romaeuropa Festival (RM), OTO Sound Museum Zurich (CH), The Others (TO). The collective collaborates with La Sapienza University of Rome Faculty of Civil and Industrial Engineering on the Green Network project for the Public Space Biennial. In 2018 Polisonum received the Special "Utopia" Award of the Talent Prize and in 2016 the Best Unpublished Work Award during The Others.

The artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers presents a recorded excerpt from his work Serious Immobilities (Module 4/Instrumental Version). The title is a quote from the introduction of the famous piece Vexations by Erik Satie: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” Meyers originally composed the ten music-performance modules of Serious Immobilities to be performed continuously over a span of 6 hours a day by 2 musicians and 4 singer/dancers for his first show at the gallery Esther Schipper (Berlin, 2013). What we hear in Meyers’ piece for OTO Sound Museum is Module No. 4, as played in 2014 in the famed Berlin space Kantine am Berghain by two musicians with whom the artist has often worked over the years. Conceived almost as a sculpture, the musicians play directly across from each other for 45 minutes, facing one another, repeating and shifting a cyclical and energetic musical phrase, in a dark and ritual atmosphere, witnessed by an absorbed audience that tightly surrounds them in the middle of the space. The musicians become tableaux vivants locked in a paradoxical immobility of pure repetitive intensity. They immerse themselves in their amplified sound, they merge into it, and we do it with them now years later, also questioning our ability to listen and visualize: the performance and its recording become today an evocative rite.

Ari Benjamin Meyers 

(b. 1972, USA) lives and works in Berlin. Meyers received his training as a composer and conductor at The Juilliard School, Yale University, and Peabody Institute. Trading the concert format for that of the exhibition, his widely presented works – such as K Club (2019), Kunsthalle for Music (2018) and Symphony 80 (with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, 2017) – explore structures and processes that redefine the performative, social, and ephemeral nature of music as well as the relationship between performer and audience. His diverse practice features performances for the stage and for exhibition spaces as well as three operas including a commission for the Semperoper Dresden, a ballet for the Paris Opera, and most recently the experimental music-theater work Forecast (2021) for the Volksbühne Berlin. Meyers has often worked collaboratively and has realized multiple joint projects with artists such as Tino Sehgal, Anri Sala, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, as well as with bands such as The Residents, Chicks on Speed, and Einstürzende Neubauten. A number of his works including the upcoming Rehearsing Philadelphia (various locations, 2022) and Werksorchester (Osten Festival Bitterfeld, 2022) as well as the ongoing The Long Parade (Beaufort Triennial, 2021) focus on the public and civic sphere and involve large-scale music-based communal rituals. Further recent solo exhibitions and presentations include K Club at MAAT, Lisbon (2021); Vexations II at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri/Esther Schipper, Berlin (2020); Solo at Yellow Solo, Berlin (2020); K Club at Blitz Club, Munich (2020); Ari Benjamin Meyers: Kunsthalle for Music at MCA Santa Barbara (2019); Tacet at Kunstverein Kassel (2019) and In Concert at OGR Turin (2019). His works have been shown internationally in institutions and festivals including at Urbane Künste Ruhr (2021); Kunstsammlung Gera (2021); Neues Museum Nürnberg (2020); Schering Stiftung, Berlin (2020); VAC Foundation, Moscow (2019); Frac Franche-Comté (2019); Pinault Collection, Punta della Dogana, Venice (2019); Liverpool Biennial (2018); Nowy Teatr, Warsaw (2018); Public Art Munich (2018); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2018); Sonic Somatic Festival, Florence (2018); Biennale de Lyon (2017); Spring Workshop, Hong Kong (2017); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2017) and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2016). His artist book Tacet in Concert was published by Corraini Edizioni in 2019.

Turbulence in C minor is a sound sample collected from the installation Chaotic arrangement for 66 voices (2021) by Axel Crettenand, an apparatus designed to translate the chaotic behavior of temperature into a choir of human voices. The process comes to life in a volume of water that reminds a monochrome monolith, embodiment of a scientific direction: data are collected through thermometers spread in the water and sent to a program specifically designed to translate the temperature information into MIDI notes in real time, which are ultimately synthesized into voices. The outcome is a sound orchestration that intertwines and overlaps different voices, chords and notes giving rise to a random and unpredictable harmony that does not respond to any musical writing, nor to any previous score. Instead, it is the immediate result of the unrepeatability of a chaotic process that manifests itself in the turbulent oscillations of the water’s temperature collected at a given time and place. Here then, behind the choral vocalism that belongs to the human being, there is a scientific process; a passage is opened up, allowing spirituality and science to meet while the relationship between man and machine is once again tickled. The sound piece Turbulence in C minor, recorded in October 2021, was not the subject of any post-production nor compositional intervention.

Axel Crettenand

(b. 1989, Switzerland) lives and works between Switzerland and Italy. His practice takes the form of installations, sounds, texts, videos and images. A central theme of his work is the observation and representation of the invisible forces that give shape to the material world. He is specifically interested in exploring and producing intersections between ritual and scientific practices and experimenting with transdisciplinary approaches. Seeking collaborations with authors and professionals from  other fields of research, he generates contaminations between different perspectives and hybridations within the processes of proof making in order to imagine alternative ways of reading and understanding reality. In recent years he started a new research focused on the narratives of the collapse of civilization, with a first couple of works realized and exhibited in 2023. Axel Crettenand earned his MA in Fine Arts at the ZHdK (Zurich) after obtaining a BA in photography at the ECAL (Lausanne). His work has recently been presented at the International Sound Biennial (Sion), Klang Moore Schopfe (Gais), Helmhaus (Zurich), Johann Jacobs Museum (Zurich), and the Collegiale of Neuchâtel. In 2023 Pro Helvetia Cairo Liaison awarded the Co-creation prize to Eart_ض, a research project he is developing with Zaira Oram and Qanat collective between Switzerland and Morocco.

The work of Vanessà Heer is an invitation to explore the practice of non-human listening and to concentrate on a metaphysical journey of memory. The artist is a witness of sound and thanks to recording technologies she brings us back the acoustic suggestions of a walk in the mountains. Regardless of place or space, this sound report offers the possibility to listen and participate into this experience. Our ears have been amplified by microphones: in this way we find ourselves receptors of sounds that we could never have heard. As undirected listeners to the experience, we are invited to perceive and attribute a new value to objects, whose relationships generate sound in their collision and encounter. Nature comes alive, the elements of nature are the active protagonists of exploration and challenge us with the limits of our human understanding. In her process of documentation, Vanessà Heer decides to get involved. The artist does not abandon the sounds to their reality, but chooses to interact with them, creating further suggestions for the listeners, also in direct experience for herself. In assuming this half-human, half-animal state, she questions the relationship between artist and nature, between present and memory.

Vanessà Heer

(b. 1989, CH) is a Swiss-born and Zurich based sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. In different contexts, collaborations and spaces she explores the political and ethical possibilities of conscious listening and how it can be used as a feminist, decolonial and sustainable tool. In both her performative and her installative works, she constantly oriented towards questions of commonality, collaboration, the dissolving authorship, and the challenges of self-precarization. Her immersive sonic interventions are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots. She studied at the Zurich University of the Arts, both Theory and Fine Arts. Among the exhibitions: WO WIR. Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, CH, Other Planes of There. Gessnerallee. Zurich, CH, Spinewave. Public Voices! w/AMBRA, Pro Helvetia/COINCIDENCIA. Buenos Aires, Argentina, BFF Art 2015: no.01_silent riots of vulnerability. UFO Factory, Detroit, USA., Hammam Singing – Appenzeller Zäuerli. Marrakech Biennale 2016, Morocco. Among the Publications: Simulacrum. Journal for contemporary art and culture, Amsterdam (2020),  Art, Self & System. Edited by Donatella Bernardi, Sternberg Press, Berlin (2019),  Art & Crisis. A Polyphonic Research on the Contemporary. Edited by Donatella Bernardi, JRP|Ringier, Zurich (2018).

The ongoing project A Symphony Of Cities by Moroccan artist Abdellah M. Hassak is the result of his archival practices and sound exploration of urban environments.
With a background as an engineer of new technologies, the artist explores cities from the perspective of an acoustic architect. He analyses the patterns by archiving their signs and creating sound maps. The sounds – either recorded by the artist himself, sometimes with the help of collaborators based in other geographies, or else taken from digital platforms – are then subjected to a process of transformation. Through a software of the artist’s own conception, a computer processing model designed to transform sound phenomena into the MIDI language "Musical Instrument Digital Interfaces", the traces of the urban space become an orchestral composition. Hence, in A Symphony Of Cities the listener is invited to consider the result of this elaboration as a sound representation of the acoustic essence of a city. It is an invitation to reinterpret the sonic contribution of the urban environment and to reflect on the process that a city unconsciously undertakes every day in the creation of its own soundscape. The city 'builds' itself, composes and conducts a daily orchestra. The sound universe of a city is the custodian of multiple narratives and poetics.
A Symphony Of Cities 2022 is a work based on recordings from the cities of Marrakech (where Abdellah M. Hassak lives), Gnesta (where he has recently been in virtual residency), Lima and Voronezh (the cities of the artists Milagros Bedoya and Tatiana Danilevskaya, with whom the artist was in dialogue as part of a project at Art Lab Gnesta). This project intends to solicit opportunities for meeting, leading to a critical reinterpretation of the urban identities and initiating a dialogue between the idea of real common space and geographical and narrative imagery.

Abdellah M. Hassak

(b. 1984, Morocco) is a sound artist, new media and music producer as well as art director. His research explores processes of participative sonic mapping at the urban level, integrating sound, daily technologies and radio as tools to foster agency in inhabitants' narrations of their environment. His work takes the form of performances and installations that include sound objects. This approach often involves transformative aspects of sound that are linked to concepts such as soundscape, resonance, frequency and noise, and new technologies. Abdellah has been collaborating with many institutions and cultural spaces in Morocco and abroad in radiophonic and sound practice, such as Esad Grenoble / Esav Marrakech / Mudawanat - Culture Resource / Qanat Collective / Dar Bellarj / Think Tanger / e-Joussour - Radio impact. He launched the Radio and Archive sound platform Mahattat Radio and develops a musical syncretic Afrofuturism music with field recordings practice as a Producer/DJ. He is co-founder of 4S', a Moroccan NGO which carries the FeMENA project, dedicated to the professionalization of women in the electronic music sector. His work has been presented in numerous group shows in different countries such as: 2012, D-CAF | Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival; 2014, Marrakech Biennale 5th Edition, Trading Urban Stories, Marrakesh; 2015, MASNAÂ - Le square d'en bas, Casablanca; 2015, Made in Friche Machine, festival d'arts numériques, Marseille; 2017, Radio Papesse - Süden Radio Symposium; 2017, Supercopy - Festival der / Samplingkultur | zeitraumexit; 2017, Port25, Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Mannheim; 2019, FFT Düsseldorf / 2019 - Grigri Pixel Madrid; 2019, HALLE 14 Forgotten Enlightenments, Leipzig; 2020, CTM Berlin - Festival for Adventurous Music and Art; 2020, Nakhla I Hammam. Steaming Stories, Bruxelles; 2020, Festival des Gestes de la Recherche; 2020, Pratiques d'hospitalité/Radio Papesse; 2021, Mudawanat – Culture Resource; 2022, Publication - Sound Practices in the Global South, Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues, in conversation with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay.

Derrière la mer is a sound composition by the artist Anna Raimondo, result of research that sees the texts of the Bible and the Koran meet on a common ground: the sea. The sound piece interweaves voices that compare different cultures, languages and geographies, suggesting how the two sacred texts have numerous shared references traceable in the vastness of the sea. Indeed, the sea becomes the lowest common denominator, synonymous with cultural contact and mutual reflection. Invited to imagine and move between different idioms, the listener is called upon to take the time to traverse the piece, in an intimate encounter with the sound that simultaneously embraces the sacred and the profane, beliefs and visions that belong to human beings regardless of any creed. Like a contemporary opera, Derrière la mer is accompanied by a 'booklet', accessible within the digital show on this platform. Performed by Edyta Jerząb and Jérôme Porsperger, written and composed by Anna Raimondo, the work can be listened to in the mere flow of its words, which recall both a historical geography and a geographical history - the Mediterranean - which can be recognized and re-read in the beauty of an encounter, of a touch.

Anna Raimondo

(b. 1981, Italy) lives in Brussels and works internationally. Raimondo uses voice and listening as a platform for encounter, collaboration and exchange, as tools for the diffraction of identity. Questioning the limits between private and public, between genders and their connotations, she activates or deconstructs cultural practices to encourage and reveal the inherent potentials of fluidity in identity. She completed an MA in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication (UAL, London, UK) and runs a practice-based Phd between Arba (Royale Académie de Beaux Arts) and ULB University in Brussels (BE) “New genders of listening: voices, silences, bodies and territories”. She has participated in several international solo and collective exhibitions including: “Biennale Nova” at The Centre Wallonie Bruxelles International à Paris (FR); “Brussels Universelle Multipli.city” at Centrale for Contemporry Art (BE); “Io dico Io” at the Galleria Nazionale Roma (IT); manifesta13 Marseille in 2020 (FR); the solo show  “Fronte Nazionale Naso Partenopeo” at Albumarte in 2020 (Roma, IT); “Signale - Espaces Réciproques” at the Friche la Belle de Mai in 2020 (Marseille, FR); “Nada que declarar"  at Matienzo in 2019 (Buenos Aires, AR); “Seremos serias de la manera más alegre” at Casa del Bicentenario in 2018 (Buenos Aires, AR); the collective show “Africa is not an island” at MACAAL Museum in 2018 (Marrakech, MA); “Biennale de Casablanca” in 2018 (MA); the 13th Dakar Biennal in 2018 (SN); “New boundaries of the wellness of vagynal ecosystem” at TEA Museum in 2018 (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, ES) and at Ex Elettrofonica Gallery in 2017 (Rome, IT); documenta14 at SAVVY Gallery en 2017 (DE) ; “Nous serions sérieuses de la manière la plus heureuse” at Le Cube in 2017 (Rabat, MA); “Mi porti al mare?”  at the MAAC  in 2016 (Brussels, BE); Tsonami Sound Arts Festival in 2017 (Valparaiso, CH); “loading…casa" in the frame of the Dubai Design Week in 2017 ; “You must change your life” at Stuk in 2015 (Leuven, BE); “Everyone has a sense of rhythm” at the Draf in 2015 (London, GB); the Marrakech Biennial in 2014 (MA); etc. She has been selected as artist for the Imera- Etudes Avances residency in Marseille (FR) in 2021 and won the prize of the city in the frame of the contemporary art prize Médiatine in 2018 and the Palma Ars Acustica in 2016.

Voice from afar is a sound work focusing on the famous Kurdish broadcasts of Radio Yerevan. Radio Yerevan's Kurdish broadcasts began in 1955, and soon after its launch, the radio station became one of the most important means of communication for the Kurdish-speaking community in the region. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Radio Yerevan had a great impact on the Kurdish community in Turkey: the radio's sound waves helped the community create an identity across borders. Portable radios were widespread in the region, and through them Radio Yerevan had found its listeners.
Voice from afar, however, is an abstract sound work that explores radio as receiver rather than transmitter. The artist imagines where these portable radios were: the sound travels between the mechanisms of the radio as an object and tries to recreate the listening atmosphere both physical and psychological between attempts of repression and the cultural resistance that has been passed down to this day in these voices. Voice from afar began with extensive archival research that has led the artist to imagine and reevaluate the role of radio at that time, but also to reflect on the need to preserve a culture against genocide and to question the resilience of people in the present and the freedom of speech still denied today.

Larissa Araz

(b. 1990, Turkey) has begun her studies at NYU’s Steinhardt Media, Communication and Culture and completed her undergraduate studies at the Media and Visual Arts, Sociology Department at Koç University in 2014. In her practice, Araz focuses on alternative histories, non-human witnesses, and denied evidence. Through personal narratives, she researches traces, ruins, documents, archives, accounts, silences, memories, and imaginaries that are not included in, or kept hidden from social memory. Between reality and fiction, she tries to discuss possible futures and unrevealed pasts using mythology and rituals. She uses different mediums in her practice but mainly focuses on text and image-making. She collaborates with different cultural producers such as independent radio stations, local newspapers, sound engineers, graphic designers, perfumers, and so on. Exhibitions she has participated in are: "Observatory on Deculturalization" OXYD, Winterthur, Switzerland (2023); “Words Don’t Come Easy” Dreiviertel, Bern, Switzerland (2020); “The Soil You Thread”, Akbank Sanat, Akbank Contemporary Art Prize Exhibition, Istanbul (2019); “Chance For a Miracle”, Poşe Artist Run Space, Istanbul (2018); “Survival Kit”, Cultural Transit Foundation, Yekaterinburg, Russia (2017) ; “30 under 30 Women Photographers”, Popping Club, Roma, Italy (2017); Printed, Mixer Gallery, İstanbul (2017); “Young, Fresh, Different 7”, Gallery Zilberman, İstanbul (2016); “Second Eye Women Photographers from Turkey”, Sismanoglou Megaro, Istanbul (2013). Araz attended SAHA Studio 2019-2020 and Arter Research Program 2020-2021. She is also the recipient of Prince Claus Seed Award 2021.