The biennale zones

Between / Worlds: Resonant Ecologies emerges as a profound sonic exploration and celebration of the relational dynamics between natural and cultural environments in Moss, Norway. Drawing inspiration from Bruno Latour’s idea of a “horizontal re-orientation process”, the biennale emphasizes movement as a discovery process. This conceptual framework positions sound as both material and metaphorical mediation between disparate worlds, facilitating a transit through auditory experience and participatory listening.

The exhibition unfolds across five interconnected transit zones—distinct yet fluid spaces that together create a comprehensive ecological soundscape of Moss and Jeløy:

The City Zone: Sonicity and the Sound Citizen
The City Zone focuses on urban sonic environments, exploring sound’s role as both physical phenomenon and social construction. It highlights how sound shapes citizenship, collective identities, and cultural narratives through participatory art. Here, artists disrupt traditional sonic hierarchies between creator and listener, employing collaborative methodologies that encourage communal engagement and challenge modes of perception.

The Forest Zone: Sonified Ecologies
The Forest Zone delves into botanical and zoological existence, harnessing electronic sonification to amplify the usually inaudible lives of micro-organisms and non-human entities. The technology-infused soundscapes invite listeners to reconsider perception, emphasizing the validity of sensory experiences beyond visual dominance and foregrounding multispecies relationships and ecological interconnectedness.

The Water Zone: Sonic Sensorium
This Water Zone enables listeners to immerse themselves in submerged sonic worlds, exploring sounds beneath water surfaces, thus amplifying the invisible boundaries and ecological interactions within aquatic ecosystems. Situated listening here becomes a form of cohabitation and a fluid engagement with non-human environments, capturing transient moments and hidden ecological dynamics.

The Jeløy Zone: Resonant Worlds
In the Jeløy Zone, sound serves as a medium bridging technological and human interactions. Re-sounding—sound returning, reflecting, and refracting—emerges prominently, illustrating sonic duplications and resonances that blur the boundaries between original and echo. Performances and installations utilize live electronics, ambient textures, and poetic vocalizations, encouraging audiences to sense their environments anew through sonic reflections.

The Gallery Zone: Silent Manipulations – Alternative Timeforms
The Gallery Zone investigates sound through its silence and subtle manipulations. Employing transductive techniques—altering signals from one medium to another—this zone reveals hidden material and semiotic relationships. Works here challenge traditional understandings of sound, emphasizing its temporal fluidity and ontological complexity, interrogating how alternative experiences of time can emerge from sonic mediation.