TO)pot Festival of radical soundwalks

Festival of radical soundwalks25 – 29 Sep 2024Cukrarna Gallery and public spacesLjubljana, SloveniaAugenmas • a l l j a • Colin Black • Maja Bjelica • beepblip • Nika van Berkel • Tetiana Khoroshun • Maria Magdalena Kozlowska • Rene Markovič • Spiro Mason • OR poiesis • Irena Pivka • plants • Karmen Ponikvar • Eduardo Raon • Urša Sekirnik • Jacek Smolicki • spaces • Sava šumi • urban animals • Tea Vidmar • Miloš Vojtěchovský • Brane Zorman • Tery Žeželj

TO)pot, a festival of soundwalks, concerts, and reflections, brings together artists, theorists, and curious walkers to connect with spaces and more-than-human entities, transforming walking and listening into a spatial realisation of location. As a practice of grounding and attuning to the environment, walking becomes a radical attempt to decelerate the everyday pace of life.Held during a unique time of the year, when the atmosphere clears and migratory birds change territories, the noisy starlings – now common city dwellers – fall silent, and plants enter their mature period. Amidst this backdrop, the festival offers, through selected artworks, a tapping into urban spaces and paths, highlighting their multi-temporality and thus offering the possibility of embodying space. TO)pot encourages a deeper reflection of how to live-with-spaces, encompassing all beings and entities.As part of a five-day programme and pre-festival events across various locations, this year’s festival edition presents works that explore the acoustic ecology and sonority of spaces and their multi-temporal dimensions. The main selection of artists, researchers, and spaces is interconnected by a related milieu. The featured works engage with the acoustics, history, ecology, social life, and multi-temporality of spaces, transforming the inaudible or forgotten into the audible and fostering a dialogue with more-than-human subjects … The festival’s guiding principle, Living-with-spaces, invites us to examine human relations with the environment and spaces in a (radically) different economic frameworks, through a rethinking of the concept of care and the potential benefits of slowing down.

This year’s festival seeks to unpack the significance of slowing down social time through walking and listening, encouraging a different use of spaces that can be reclaimed from the hyperproduction of temporality. By shifting focus from visual to auditory perception, the festival aims to unlock a more inclusive use of the environment, treating it as a holistic ecosystem encompassing all entities. Perhaps the development of a deep ecological mindset could help us slow down human time and better appreciate the interconnectedness of human and non-human animals, plants, and spaces. The festival endeavours to inextricably weave together these elements, highlighting the importance of coexistence and the quality of temporality it fosters. Through listening and engaging with the life of spaces and non-human beings, we may discover new insights and learn invaluable lessons.