lucky dragons – Sentences About Rivers and Cancers
SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022
30 September – 23 October 2022 – Rode Brug in Amstelpark, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Commissioned for Sonic Acts Biennial 2022, ‘Sentences About Rivers and Cancers’ draws on personal experiences of cancer treatment, caregiving, the environmental and financial toxicities that precede and accompany illness, and the enduring contaminations that cancer and its treatment produce.

The multi-channel audio installation was informed by time spent living close to the Hoosic River, which flows through the ancestral lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok: The People of the Waters that are Never Still. The conditions of the river became conditions for research: a watery analysis, thinking with bodies as pressurised wet salty things, to better understand conditions of interbeing, entanglement, and porosity.

In this site-specific installation commissioned by Sonic Acts, listening was situated within a shared speculative space, a series of tactile transducers along Amstelpark’s Rode Brug, creating vibratory channels that flow together as listeners cross from one side to the other. The arrangement of sounds distributed across these channels includes re-synthesized field recordings of the Hoosic River, watershed recordings from above and below the water’s surface and a chorus of voices, spoken and sung stories – observations and meditations on the socio-political and ecological entanglements that compose cancer as lived experience.

lucky dragons is an ongoing collaboration between artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck. They research forms of participation and dissent, purposefully working towards a better understanding of existing ecologies through performances, publications, recordings, and public art. The name lucky dragons is borrowed from the fishing vessel caught in fallout from American H-bomb tests in the mid-1950s, an incident which sparked international outcry and gave birth to the worldwide anti-nuclear movement. In 2021, they were selected as participants for Sonic Acts’ OVEREXPOSED residency programme, and have presented their work in a wide variety of contexts, including REDCAT, LACMA, MOCA and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou, 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, the Whitney Biennial among many others.

INNER EAR(TH)
During the second weekend of its 2022 Biennial, from 7 to 9 October, Sonic Acts presented an extensive sound art programme at Het HEM, with a wide range of concerts, transmissions, installations, workshops and field explorations. Resonating with the location’s complex histories, the programme excavated the multiple ecologies and geographies of the inner ear and earth through the reverberations of spatial sound.

Find out more at
https://sonicacts.com/discover/bienni...
https://luckydragons.org

CREDITS
Curation & production: Sonic Acts
Recording: BJ Nilsen https://bjnilsen.info
Videography team: Alcaeus Spyrou, Davide Ghelli Santuliana, FridayMilk, Roman Ermolaev
Video editing: Hrvoslava Brkusic
Sound mastering: Hrvoje Niksic, Kramasonik Studio
Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org