What grows around Alexanderplatz? How do we perceive plants and how does the spatial environment influence this perception? What is our relationship to plant life when we observe or touch it? How can we learn to understand the ways plant express themselves?

A walk, a color workshop, an exercise in listening and a conversation explore personal encounters with the plant world.

6–7 pm
Listening Through Hands
Lecture Performance by Mélia Roger

With microphones attached to her hands and listening to the amplified touch through headphones, Mélia Roger explores hidden and unheard layers of the landscape. She is stroking, touching, feeling the roughness of surfaces she is care-fully listening to. Inspired by the notion of “in-between” developed by the sound artist and researcher Salomé Voegelin, the sonic textures created with this concept are highlighting relations normally existing in void and silence, without any touch. The point of connection, seemingly a sonic friction, can be explored with care and tenderness, questioning the consent of others – as if the microphones were activating the troubled layer between her hands and the non-human skin. Trying to shift away from an anthropocentric listening position, Mélia Roger offers the term ‘eco-empathic listening’ to address the act of carefully listening to non-human and more-than-human beings: Listening to her touch of barks, rocks and leaves, she offers an embodied way to listen to others.

Mélia Roger is an artist and sound designer for film and art installation. Her work explores the sonic poetics of landscape through field recordings and active listening performances. Exploring human-non-humans relations, she tries to inspire ecological change with environmental and empathic listening. With a background in classical music and sound engineering, she developed an artistic approach of sound when studying in the Transdisciplinary Studies Program at Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland (ZHdK), working with voice and field recordings. She is living between Paris and Zurich.

7–8pm
Discussion with Dunja Krcek and Mélia Roger, moderated by Gilly Karjevsky