Interspecies walk – find a tortoise

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/09/2019
All Day

Location
Botanical Garden


Following her artistic sound research during Made of Walking (V) in Prespes, Ros Bandt Australian sound artist, staying in Athens on Sound Walk Sunday, September 1st, invites to an interspecies walk, find a tortoise in the Athens botanical garden and imitate it without it noticing.

An event based on walking the acoustic spaces of Prespes through the ears of underwater bugs, prehistoric fish, goats, pelicans, spiders and tortoises to reconsider our human interventions, underwater, in the air, in our dreams. The act of walking is time dependent, situational, puncturing acoustic space. Presence and absence, responsibility resilience and change can be heard.

Dr Ros Bandt, Sounding Spaces is an internationally sought after , award winning Australian sound artist who is at once inventive composer and designer, multi-instrumentalist, sound sculptor, installation artist, curator, and scholar. She is famous for her profound sonic engagement with specific works in acoustic spaces be it indoor or outdoor, the gallery, warehouse, industrial carparks, wheat silos, the Murray River, American biosphere reserves, or the ancient outdoor site of Lake Mungo. Her multi-sensory approach pays particular attention to the audience engagement and her works are often collaborative with locals from the place. In 2017 she was the guest artist in the Animart Festival Delphi / Made of Walking (III) designing 5 nights of sonic metamorphoses followed by the first performance of the commissioned Under the sacred oak for the first Dodoni festival with Arthur McDevitt, ancient Greek texts and sculptures by Dodoni archaeologist Effie Stavrou . Her sonic archeologies are well known to involve complex and unpredictable confluences reflecting her interest in science art technology and the environment made sensory through audible digital multi modal installations and performances. She has created the acoustic sanctuary 55 acres of land for wild life in the Jaarajaara bush in the Goldfields in Victoria as land for wildlife where she studies air and underwater soundscapes in change. She is founding director of the Australian sounddesign project online database, gallery investigating sound designs in public space in Australia.
www.rosbandt.com
www.hearingplaces.com

Rethinking the act of walking in my site specific practice Sounding Spaces, personally and collaboratively. By Ros Bandt.

The importance of being in place as acoustic space has driven my art practice since the beginning. The sounds of feet on the ground, the sound of the foetal heartbeat and oceans are the sounds common to all nations. They were the subject of my piece Footsteps, the title track of an early CD. Allowing the listening audience to “Walking through” my chaotic sound installations, set up a complexity of flickering sonic confluences which were unpredictable., and walker determined compositions. I designed the SSIIPP system to effect this, designing open works never heard the same twice. My pilgrimages to archaeological sites since the 90s have inspired many works which often walk from their original source (Mungo) to other sites. Fixed and moving points effect audition, what we hear and how, and where it is heard. Collaborative works such as Listening through the walls engaged the audience in re -walking and rehearing their ancient Minoan town of Hania in Crete sharing and recording their special sites on rubbings which became part of the exhibition. The tarhu, a special cross- cultural instrument was a point of focus for a decade. The 2 CD Tarhu Connections records a decade of the wanderings and encounters. An accident while playing it forced me to reconsider the fast (spider) and the slow (the tortoise) in a new light giving rise to the 2017 international collaborative work, The tortoise and the spider assisted by Made of Walking. It also gave me insight into the able -bodied arrogance and exclusion of the disabled in most debates. How do we walk. When is walking not walking? Our feet sonify the earth on every surface ,a sonic feedback loop , instant information informing us about habitat and safety. Audible walks sound walks and mediated walks now have a large history, growing rapidly since the WFAE and soundscape practices.

Recording the sounds and speeds of the non -anthropocene has reinforced my preoccupation with openended journeys, walking at different speeds, flickers , strands, fragments at the same time, as a continuing theme in my sound art practice which seeks to inquire about the nature of the world and our position in it through the auditory. Recent scientific research has ratified this approach. My writings and research have centred on blurring boundaries and designing with improvised and chaotic systems from the outset. There are many ways to proceed. Can we walk together? Where/ for how long? In different directions? Telematically? Telepathically? A dreaming? Real? Virtual? Imaginary? Did you hear it?