CTM 2026: Panel discussion: Ecology as Transmission: Listening with the Land

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

This panel approaches ecology not as something that exists outside or beyond human life, but as a field that is deeply entangled with bodies, technologies, and histories. In many Western contexts, human existence is still imagined as separate from “nature,” which results in other beings, land, materials, and resources being treated as passive matter that merely supports human culture and political life. The artists in this conversation challenge that separation by engaging with sound, ecological processes, and technological systems as interconnected networks that carry, store, and transform lived experience.

Working with seismic vibrations, heavy metals, radio signals, indigenous worldviews, bodily resonance, and environmental sound, their practices ask questions such as: “What sensations does the land register, and what signals can the body carry?” Instead of simply depicting ecological devastation, these works attempt to witness and attune to the layered relations, histories, and forms of eco-violence that shape our environments. They make these dynamics physically perceptible as forms of pressure, resonance and dissonance, toxicity, interference, renewal, and transmission.

Situated between artistic and theoretical discourse as well as the urgent realities of ecological crisis, the panel reflects on listening as an embodied and ethical mode of attention, and on sound as a form of knowledge. It invites a conversation on how listening, sensing, and engaging with these entangled forms of eco-violence might transform our understanding of ecology as a shared and embodied condition that moves through land, through human and nonhuman bodies, and through the technologies that connect them.