Opening Rewire 2023, the festival will kick-off with a freely accessible opening programme at The Grey Space in The Middle, with conversations and listening sessions introducing the festival’s theme Inter/relations. The programme will start with a listening session to The Soundscape Speaks, an audio piece by composer, radio artist, and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp, who turned to her archive of sound recordings, inviting us to listen to the environment across time and space. The listening session will be followed by an open assembly, with contributions by Heloisa Amara, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Carla J. Maier, and Mark Peter Wright, introducing and discussing the various themes, listening practices and conversations that will unfold over the following days. Researcher, theatre director, and composer meLê yamomo will present and discuss their video-lecture-performance around Sonus and Sonic Entanglements. Artists Vivian Caccuri, Vica Pacheco, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, and Matteo Marangoni, will enter into a conversation on their work as part of the Proximity Music exhibition Visceral Acts, and the ways in which they invite us to recalibrate our relations to natural ecologies. Lastly, we invite you to open your ears once more to ways of working and living in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Mount Makiling in The Philippines, listening and reflecting on Norient’s TIMEZONES podcast, with introductions by Vivian Caccuri, meLê yamomo, and Hannes Liechti.

The entire context programme is freely accessible. For the opening programme on Thursday 6 April, please reserve a free ticket here.