Tao Ho

眠/咒 – Sleepless Sleep is an improvisational sound practice by Tao Ho.
Between 眠 (sleep) and 咒 (incantation), the work inhabits a fragile space where rest and unrest quietly coexist. Sounds are allowed to linger, drift, repeat, or fall away. Small changes gather over time. There is no urgency to resolve them.
Perhaps 眠 (sleep) is not about sleep, but about a moment when the body no longer has to keep pushing forward.
The work simply remains.

SPATIAL MIXTAPE B

mira rizki ::

‘Napak Tilas’ means a journey to trace back the paths of someone to reflect on important past events and connect them to present realities. This sound installation consists of two speculative soundscapes that explore the sonic environment of the events of Jakarta in May 1998 and Gwangju in May 1980, alongside a third soundscape that juxtaposes both cities. The “Jakarta” composition is a speculative soundscape of the 1998 Indonesian riots, composed using present sound materials from Gwangju and shaped by historical published data from the actual events.
The work is intended to highlight the similarities between the riot caused by the monetary crisis in Indonesia (specifically in Jakarta) and the democratic uprising in Gwangju, showing how these patterns resonate into other events with a similar pattern and similar sound ecosystem. This is a manifestation to get to know how our perception is shaped by past events, which are presumably designed by the authorities.

Ana Gamboa ::

Lúmina is an electroacoustic work that weaves together travel recordings with fragments of anime sound to construct an imaginary space where the everyday and the fictional intertwine. Part of the sonic material was collected during a journey to Nuevo Rocafuerte, a small Amazonian village on the banks of the Napo River, reached after a fifteen-hour boat trip. Sounds of rain, birds, and daily life are combined with external materials, creating a constantly shifting soundscape.
The piece explores listening as a form of displacement, where memory, media, and environment overlap. Through layering and transformation processes, Lúmina blurs the boundaries between documentary and imagination, inviting the listener into a hybrid acoustic territory. The work was developed during a residency at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Javier Chan ::

The story of the “舞獅”, the Lion Dance, in Cantonese folklore is a story about a mythical monster that terrorizes villages on the eve of every Lunar New Year. In a faithful act of solidarity, the villages banded together to create a colourful costume, resembling that of a fierce dancing lion. Accompanied by loud noises and the traditional music of cymbals and drums, their dance was able to ward the great beast away. For many generations, rituals and performances like the Lion Dance have served as symbols of resistance, remembrance and community for people all across the world. They are bound not just by culture, but by shared struggle.
A Repository of Sonic Anecdotes is an ongoing project that explores the political potential of ritual and performance. The project explores the intertwining of practices of sound production, installation art, and interpretive dance as a collaborative medium to commemorate the memories of dissolved communities and their lost spaces amid the ever-developing, ever-expanding, and ever-urbanizing conditions of the metropolitan world. Centred on the Lower East Side neighbourhood, this research tells the story of how a once lively, vibrant, and culturally knitted neighbourhood fades into oblivion, by way of mass gentrification and spatial injustice.

This project is guided by a curiosity about the formation of “new” culture. A curiosity in: How can we create new practices, rituals, and traditions in a post-industrial metropolitan world? Not to replace the cultures and communities that have been lost, but to highlight the histories of their existence and struggle. With discussions of territory and belonging being at the forefront of Homelands’ research focus for this presentation, this project will ask audiences to consider the role of ritual and performance in the context of empowerment and preservation. How do performances become tools of storytelling to preserve culture and community? How do artistic practices come to serve as symbols of resistance? The outcome of this project will be the creation and presentation of a new form of ritualistic performance, a framework for a new culture of remembering and connecting with space.

Structurally, the project was organized into stages of Research, Experimentation, and Production. Including processes of: site research, archival studies, documentation, interviews, writing, drawing, field recording, sound production, object-scavenging, object-making, sculptural installation, and interpretive choreography. This project culminated in a performance at Columbia University, with Harlem Dance Theatre dancer Elias Delano Re.

For New Ear ::SPATIAL, the presentation is a 6-minute sound piece consisting of three distinct movements that were composed for the performance. The piece itself involved several experiments in sound production, recording and “sound-making”. One key element of the sound production involved the recording of improvised instruments, which were made by rebuilding scavenged and unused objects such as old furniture and pipes found at the site. Through different trials of sampling and modulation testing in the sound production, the result was the creation of a sound palette that captures the textural and material qualities of a space lost to time, transforming into something new.