RND: Dissonated Listening

Lefteris Krysalis, Federica Notari, Kika Echeverría

00:00

Free entry

In a short welcome word, Anita Jóri (CTM Festival, Leuphana University Lüneburg) introduces CTM 2026's Research Networking Day and festival theme dissonate < > resonate.

Module 1 is hosted by Darsha Hewitt (Kunst Universität Linz)

Aphonic Echotopia: Listening to the Greek Borderland

Lefteris Krysalis (PhD Candidate, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar)

»Aphonic Echotopia« is a presentation based on my ongoing two-year PhD field and artistic research on the soundscapes of the Greek borderland in Western Thrace. The work explores the politics of listening and how listening to soundscapes can be a situated, political act that confronts the border’s visible and invisible apparatus by focusing on the arrhythmic, polyrhythmic, and rhythmic soundscapes shaped by fences and patrols, oppressions and differential inclusions, ecological and political urgencies, dissonant and resonant past and present landscapes.

The presentation examines three aphonic soundscapes: A. The post-fire forest of Dadia, where the 2023 wildfire — the largest ever recorded in the EU — left behind 93,500 hectares of burned land and claimed the lives of at least 19 refugees who were trying to cross, transforming it now into a landscape penetrated by the echoes of planes and distant military drills; B. Mikro Dereio, a small minority village where drones and barking dogs disrupt the night and border patrols resonate with the area’s past as a supervised military zone; and C. Sidiro, another minority village where the most dissonant silence surrounds an unmarked mass grave of refugees.

The presentation invites the audience to think of listening as an act of witnessing and care toward the stories masked by the noise of the border.

Lefteris Krysalis holds a B.A. in Art History and Theory from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an M.F.A. in Media Art and Design from Bauhaus University Weimar. A DAAD scholarship holder (2018–2020) and former coordinator of the Radio Art Residency Weimar, he is currently an artistic associate at the Experimental Radio Chair and a PhD candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar, researching the soundscapes of Western Thrace and the politics of listening.

Through Sounds

Federica Notari (Research Department at Nieuwe Instituut)

»Through Sounds« explores sonic infrastructures, the conditions that shape how we access, transmit, and gather through sound. These infrastructures influence not only the ways we listen, but also the very texture of sound itself and the ways in which is resonates. The project brings together practices that ground discourse of sonic cultures. Listening spaces, whether a concert hall, a rave, a street boombox, digital platforms, MP3s and streaming are increasingly fragile, while entangling them ever more deeply with the digital sphere. Existing in legal grey zones, these cultures navigate frameworks of event permits, copyright, and piracy. 

An example: the 2004 Avril Lavigne dakou CD, bought for 10 yuan at a shop in Nanjing, China. Dakou CDs were foreign releases sent for recycling, marked with drilled holes to prevent resale — yet still sold. Bootlegged and locally remixed, they embody global flows of music and the material, economic, and legal tensions they carry. Asking where we listen has become ever more urgent, also for our online selves, Spotify CEO transitioning into the defence tech sector – we can’t ignore how our listening habits online are entangled in larger economic, political and social resonances. 

The project also publishes a series of publications under the name; Clipping. In sound, clipping refers to when sound exceeds limits, creating jagged noise where excess becomes expression. Clippings reassemble the ephemeral gatherings into printed published material.

Federica Notari is a researcher and programmer at Nieuwe Instituut with a focus on practices of place-making, epistemologies of knowledge, and sonic infrastructures. In November 2023, she initiated Through Sounds, a project that investigates the infrastructures of sound, the places where we listen. She has taught at Leiden University, supervised theses at Rietveld Academy. Federica is the founder of events and collectives Words off the Page and Discoteca Amore.

The Voices that Wait: A Resonant Archive

Kika Echeverría (independent artist and researcher)

This presentation explores my encounter with the archive of Chile al día, a radio programme broadcast from the GDR to Chile between 1973 and 1990, produced by Chilean journalists living in exile due to Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here, I focus on my listening experience as a researcher, in which I underwent a listening shift that led me to perceive this material not merely as an archive, but as a »radio out of time,« capable of transmitting its message of political resistance into the present.

What potential can we find in practising a situated listening to sound archives, engaged with an aesthetic of resonance? Are there any traces from the past flying around to become part of the present? 
 
Following this shift, I revisit the concept of radio as resonance (Friz, 2009), emphasising that transmissions can deepen our understanding of co-presence and foster relational circuits where airwaves remain dynamic yet vulnerable to disruption. I attend to the relationship between the archive and broadcast from a speculative and hauntological viewpoint, conceiving listeners as active participants rather than passive receivers. The archive embodies the past, while listening embodies the present in its becoming, positioning these sonic elements as a radio transmission that creates a fissure where time blurs. Listening becomes the gesture that gives it form.

Kika Echeverría is an anthropologist, artist, and sound researcher born in Chile and based in Berlin. Her practice, rooted in research, conceives memory as a creative tool and explores the political aspects of sound phenomena through listening. Recent works include sound installations at Ars Electronica and CHB, as well as archival research that highlights sonic traces of resistance. She works across installation, writing, and collective processes with artists and diverse communities.

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