ZAHRA MALKANI
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.
