Why Listen to Plants?
This sound-based exhibition offers a plant-listening program, by artists from Australia and Scandinavia from backgrounds including acoustic ecology, installation/visual art, performance and experimental music. Listeners are embedded in purpose-built mini greenhouses as they listen to sounds made by plants, sounds made with plants, and sounds made with plants’ listening pleasure in mind. (Link to full essay: Welcome to the Jungle)
MUSIC BY PLANTS
Leah Barclay (AU) Stratification
Margrethe Pettersen (NO) Den levende erfaring
Makiko Yamamoto (AU) Banana a-part; […]; Onion; In conjunction
Felicity Mangan and Christina Ertl-Shirley (AU/DE) Live at Errant Sound
Kalle Hamm and Lauri Ainala (FI) Peruna/Rhubarb
Kalle Hamm and Dzamil Kamanger (NO) Garden of invasive alien species
Daniel Slåttnes (NO) Stueplanta feat. DJ Printa / The houseplant feat. DJ Printa
MUSIC FOR PLANTS
Libby Harward (AU) Minyang nyinda yarinya? Minyang nyinda yagay ba? / What are you saying? What are you doing?
Margrethe Pettersen (NO) Empetrum nigrum
Laurie Anderson (US) Love lives of plants
Nathan Gray (AU) The Station
Monica Winther (NO) Playlist for plants; Recording from exhibition lost in paradise
Daniel Slåttnes (NO) Å lære å kjenne en plante / To learn to know a plant
Plants: Adiantum; Alium cepa; Artemisia vulgaris; Avicennia marina; Ceiba pentandra; Chlorophytum Comosum; Clivia; Crassula ovata; Empetrum Nigrum; Fomes fomentariusI; Heracleum persicum; Hierochloe odorata; Impatiens glandulifera; Lagarostrobos franklinii; Musa; Notocacteae; Philodendron; Prunus laurocerasus; Rheum rhabarbarum; Rhizophora mangle; Rosa rugosa
Co-curated by Danni Zuvela (LA) and Karolin Tampere (NNKS).
Presented in partnership with the North Norwegian Art Centre (NNKS) alongside the Lofoten Sound Art Symposium.
This program is a collaboration and a conversation between Karolin Tampere and Danni Zuvela and between our respective organisations, NNKS and Liquid Architecture (LA). LA is an Australia organisation dedicated to artists working with sound and listening. Joel Stern is the co-Artistic Director of LA, and this program forms part of LA’s larger project Why Listen to Plants, taking place in Berlin, Lofoten, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Hepburn and Melbourne between August and December 2018. Why Listen to Plants builds on ideas first developed by Joel and Danni in LA’s 2016 program Why Listen to Animals. Both are part of LA’s larger ongoing investigation exploring non-human listening, Why Listen? Karolin Tampere and Danni Zuvela have worked together since 2017 when Karolin performed at LA’s Body Languages event. This exhibition is in a dialogue with the Lofoten Sound Art Symposium, organized by Karolin Tampere and Svein Ingvoll Pedersen, from 6-9 September 2018.
Lofoten Sound Art Symposium’s thematics and activities will primarily be informed by the participating artists’ practices. However, taking place in the surroundings of the Lofoten islands and taking a cue from the practice of some of the most interesting recent and ongoing work in the field of sound art, the program will have a special focus on sound and nature as a present and crucial, entry point. The landscape of Lofoten is widely known for its aesthetic qualities; images of its extraordinary surroundings are reproduced and distributed extensively. In parallel to this often romanticised, static image – of the human idea of wilderness – these archipelagos are places in transformation. These are grounds where the idea of nature, and various claims on it, are played out amidst the shifting forces of commercial fishing and tourism industries in uneasy co-existence with increasing interests in oil extraction. What is the sound of the sea-bed? What noise is concealed by the roar of wind, waves and water?
THANKS:
The Artists
Installers: Magnus Holmen, Anna Näumann, Torill Østby Haaland, Karolin Tampere & Danni Zuvela
Painter: Svolvær Idrettslag Gutter -07
Carpenter: Gerhard Augustin
Designer: Jaye Carcary
Ideas, Inspiration and Nourishment: Aunty Glenda Nalder, Aunty Mary Graham, Monica Gagliano, Joel Stern, Georgia Hutchison, Debris Facility, Elena Betros, Tom Smith, Simon Hjermind Jensen, Camilla Fagerli, Berte Tungodden Ynnesdal, Svein Ingvoll Pedersen, Rhodiola rosea, Inonotus obliquus
Curated by Danni Zuvela, with Karolin Tampere. Why Listen to Plants is presented with The Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (LSAS). The exhibition is part of Why Listen, which is an umbrella for a suite of other investigations by Liquid Architecture, including Why Listen to Animals? (2016; 2019); 2018’s major investigation, Why Listen to Plants?, and more to come.
Liquid Architecture is an Australian organisation for artists working with sound. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening. Their program stages encounters and creates spaces for sonic experience, and critical reflection on sonority and systems of sonic affect. In conjunction with Lofoten Sound Art Symposium they have commissioned two new works by artists Nathan Gray and Makiko Yamamoto.
This project is generously supported by Creative Victoria.

