Voice as Landscape presents:
Borrowing a Distant Hill
~DAY 1~
Please note: You can purchase a single-day festival ticket to attend in person on Friday 31.05 or Saturday 01.06, or a ticket for the Friday evening livestream, via the ‘Buy ticket’ link (the livestream is only available on Friday). There is also the option to buy a discounted combi-ticket for in-person access to both festival days. For the combi-ticket, click here. For the DAY 2 webpage, click here.
A two-day festival that seeks to explore the dynamic interplay between language, movement, and cultural identity, with a focus on the voice as a transformative force that traverses nations, cultures, and time. Rooted in the notion that language travels (as an object) in ways that generate nuanced meanings through form, interlinguistics, and sound matter, the project aims to investigate the potential of the voice as a landscape in itself.
With: Enrico Dau Yang Wey, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Francisca Khamis Giacoman, Dina Mimi, Alec Mateo, Lorenzo Garcia Andrade, Jonás De Murias, Lou Vives.
Friday will include performances by Dina Mimi, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Lou Vives and S*an D. Henry-Smith… Saturday will be organized around the work of Francisca Khamis Giacoman, Jonás de Murias, Alec Mateo and Lorenzo Garcia-Andrade. On Saturday, one of the performances is a walk around the neighbourhood; there will be an alternative option offered involving less mobility.
About the artists:
Jonás de Murias composes soundscapes of hypertextual impetus by processing found sound/linguistic materials and live voice, gathering, tracing and unravelling feelings of belonging, desire or catastrophe. These compositions take shape of performances, sound installations or audiovisual pieces that seek to rewire biases that make us discern or relate certain materialities and sound textures to automatic ideas of origin or class; that is, to devise ways in which sonorities in abeyance or in ruins from the most disposable areas are imagined as futurable. Jonás has carried out artistic residencies at Matadero Madrid, Hammana Artist House, Laboral Centro de Arte, etc., as well as sound sessions at Fylkingen Stockholm, Fabra i Coats, Center LGTBI Barcelona, La Capella, Picnic Sessions (CA2M), Veranos de la Villa, Fira Mediterrània de Manresa, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Sala de Arte Joven de Madrid, This is jackalope, etc.; and exhibited at Matadero Madrid and other galleries.
Lou Vives works with the rehearsal as a zone of transition. Through writing, performance, and drawings, they explore the intersection of memory, pop culture, and authorship. Ultimately, their practice is an attempt to remember their life, recognizing that their life was lived by many people. In 2022, they graduated from the Moving Image department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He has presented work in various institutions and contexts such as; Arti et Amicitiae, Perdu, Garage Noord (Amsterdam); La Casa Encendida, Matadero (Madrid); Fundació Miró (Barcelona); ICA London, and Galeria Zé dos Bois (Lisbon).
Enrico Dau Yang Wey is an artist, performer and puppeteer from Taiwan. Under their umbrella project [ fertile fields ], they have been unpicking the tightly woven fibers of sound, landscape, and memory through performance and mnemonic practice. Initially compelled by the concrete nature of monuments and the (hi)stories they propose to carry, [ fertile fields ] began as a live attempt to construct memory and sound as terrain: a structure that delves into the elusive nature of memory, acknowledges the desire to contain it within solid material and struggles to dismantle it. The public iterations of the project create memorials from a collectively shared moment that is only extended by those who willingly carry it onward. Previous works have been made through the support of Danspace Project, DTW (US), Conde Duque, CA2M (ES), and LMCC’s River to River Festival (US). Apart from their own line of work and research, Wey collaborates with other creators and companies. They are a senior member of Handspring Puppet Company (SA) as seen in William Kentridge’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse and in War Horse on Broadway. They are the Puppetry Director and Associate Artistic Director for The Walk/Little Amal. Other notable roles include Shulea Cheang’s 3x3x6 (2019 Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion), Dennis Cooper/Zac Farley’s feature film Like Cattle Towards Glow and onstage for Robyn Orlin, YaaSamar Dance Theater, Big Dance Theater, Aitana Cordero, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Rob Icke.
Dina Mimi is a visual artist and filmmaker who works and lives between Palestine and the Netherlands. Dina is interested in opacity in moving images. Dina works with experimental filmmaking and lecture performances that research when bodies become sites of resistance by delving into the state of the fugitive and the act of vanishing. On muteness as a form of inherited language loss and disappearance.
S*an D. Henry-Smith is a collaborative practitioner working primarily in poetry and photography, and by extension, sound, performance and publishing. They have received awards and fellowships from Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, and Poets House. Recent solo exhibitions include “tremor low” at ROZENSTRAAT in Amsterdam (2023) and “in awe of geometry & mornings” at White Columns in New York (2021). Henry-Smith has read and performed previously at The Poetry Project, Basilica Soundscape, 47 Canal, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Buro Stedelijk and Stedelijk Museum, Metro54, and elsewhere. Their book Wild Peach (2020) was published by Futurepoem, and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and they are the author of two chapbooks: Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019). They are also the co-author (alongside Imani Elizabeth Jackson) of Consider the Tongue (2019), and the director of Lunar New Year (2021). Henry-Smith regularly collaborates in sound, poetry, performance, and education with Dweller Electronics, Imani Elizabeth Jackson as mouthfeel, Ryan C. Clarke, Danny Sadiel Peña, Alec Mateo, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, and Derica Shields, among others.
Francisca Khamis Giacoman is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. Through performances, installations, and audiovisual works, she recalls stories of migration and unfolds them at the boundaries of fiction and materiality. Her research touches upon language, knowledge production, and accessibility through narrative circulation, focusing on different ways of (re)membering ourselves and others. Actively involved in self-organized projects, Francisca co-founded the “Museo del Perro * Honden Museum” in Amsterdam (2023), “Ediciones Rocas Shop” Cooperative Publishing House in Santiago (2017-22), C.I.A (Centro de Investigación Artístico) in Santiago (2013-15) and Espacio Estamos Bien, an art cooperative in Amsterdam that curates gatherings, publications, and exhibitions. Currently, she leads the development of a support initiative for non-European students at the Sandberg Instituut and Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Alec Mateo is a Dominican artist from New York working with language, sound, and performance to negotiate the relationships between narrative and subject and explore the potential of fugitivity. Mateo studied Creative Writing at Brooklyn College and Critical Studies at the Sandberg Instituut and serves as an editor at the Perdu Foundation for Poetic Experiment.
Lorenzo García-Andrade was born in Madrid and raised in Havana. He is a cultural worker with a background in political science. Prior to relocating to Amsterdam to study at Sandberg Instituut, in 2021, he was working collaboratively in Madrid at the intersection of different artistic and curatorial practices. Parting from correspondence, the projects he develops focus on the performativities that varying practices mobilize in specific contexts and communities. His work takes the form of gardens, expanded curatorial settings, gifting, cooking, gestures and performance.
Supported by Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Ludo Pieters Gastschrijver Fonds of Cultuurfonds, and Goethe Institut. Special thanks to P////AKT.