In this lecture, Åsa Helena Stjerna will discuss the potential of sound: how sonic strategies and approaches can challenge traditional boundaries and create alternative formats for experiencing and understanding places as complex ecologies, linked to the political potential of making the overlooked heard. Informed by philosophies of ecosophy and posthumanism and based on her own artistic practice and research, she further discusses sonic art’s potential to explore and renegotiate places as complex interweavings between ideology, art, technology, the human, and the more-than-human. Site-specific sonic art can thus be understood as an ethical-aesthetic practice that explores and establishes new sonic relationships within the entanglement we call “place”.

Åsa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish installation artist, researcher, and educator, using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a place perceivable. Through perceptually sensitive and transdisciplinary driven approaches, her works create connections between the past and the present, the local and the global, and the human and the more-than-human. By this she seeks to reframe the act of listening, evoking a sensibility of places as complex ecologies. Several of her projects involve scientific collaboration, exploring how collaboration between science and art can create new artistic formats of listening that deepen our relationship with the world around us.

Stjerna has participated in an extensive number of exhibitions in Sweden and internationally, among other the Transmediale Media Festival, Berlin; the Nordic Music Days, Stockholm; the Ultima Contemporary Music festival, Oslo and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her works include several public permanents commissions. Stjerna has recently concluded her tenure as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Prior to this, she held the position of Visiting Professor in Sound Art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, Germany.

Credit: Ulrich Wagner