Time to Listen: The Ecological Crisis in Sound and Music

The “Time to Listen“ festival brings together international artists who respond to the urgency of the climate and environmental crisis with musical means. They use sounds to prompt us to reflect on our relationship with the environment, technology, indigenous knowledge, climate justice and consumerism in the Anthropocene. The artists articulate a global perspective and reveal the concern that is felt around the world, inviting us to listen to the last refuges of biodiversity in rainforests, to melting glaciers and to rivers drying out and deserts forming in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, they make us aware of the disregard for life on earth manifested by our practices of global waste management, livestock farming, overfishing and soil sealing.

Their work brings home to us the changes taking place in the environment at an experiential level, posing ethical questions and presenting ways of dealing with them both emotionally and proactively. Together, the invited artists create scenarios that offer the possibility of reviving the symbiotic relationship between humans and natural ecosystems, allowing indigenous concepts of nature to shine through as a potential means of transformation and deploying climate-neutral technologies to create sound.

With Peter Ablinger, Carola Bauckholt/Karin Hellqvist, Ulrike Draesner, Nina Dragičević, Ensemble Mosaik, FrauVonDa, Claudia Gonzáles Godoy, Rama Gottfried, Anna Hetzer, Susan Ibarra, Jacob Kirkegaard, Liza Lim, Marcus Maeder, David Monacchi, Sarah Nemtsov/Shmuel Hoffman & Anton von Heiseler, Karen Power/Loré Lixenberg, Winfried Ritsch, Daniel Rothman, Kathrin Röggla, Tania Rubio, Aleš Šteger, Kristine Tjøgersen, Manos Tsangaris, Sabine Vogel, Cécile Wajsbrot, Ute Wassermann and many others

A Festival presented by the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin

Cooperation partners: inm / field notes, FU Berlin – Institut für Biologie (Maeder production), Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Studio for Electroacoustic Music, Literature / Visual Arts Section, Kunstwelten (Worlds of Art) – Education Programme of the Akademie der Künste, IEM Graz (Ritsch production), IFA Galerie (Gonzales production), INGO / Music School Joudour Sahara / The Witness (Ibarra production), Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House (Wassermann, Rothman productions)

Sponsored by the Freunde der Akademie der Künste

Project funding from the Arts Council of Ireland (Power production), Haupstadtkulturfonds, Berlin (FrauVonDa production), Goethe-Institut (International Coproduction fund, Rubio production), Ruß Ingenieure AG (Ibarra, commissioned composition)