Resonant Dialogues: Navigating Sound, Art and Conflict | Online symposium

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening and sounding our sonic migrations. She is a Deep Listening® certified tutor, with a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation. She has created Sounding Underground; the telematic improvisations Networked Migrations; and the embodied telematic environment INTIMAL, expanding people’s sense of place and telepresence for the emergence of aural territories of memory and emotion.

Luz María Sánchez is a transdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and scholar. Sánchez received two consecutive Prix Ars Electronica’s Honorary Mentions (2020, 2021) for her project Vis.[un]necessary force. With a professional career of +26 years, Sánchez has exhibited widely in Europe and the Americas. Sánchez has authored four books on Beckett and sound and presented by invitation at leading institutions such as the School of the Art Institute Chicago and ZKM. Sánchez is preparing her first retrospective exhibition at Arsenal Galeria Miejska. Poznań (2024).

Nour Sokhon is a Lebanese artist based in Berlin. Her practice is centered around exploring different methods of working with artistic research including interview material, field recordings and recorded material from an organized site specific intervention. The research is then translated into sound/music compositions, performances, interactive installations and moving image work.

Sasha Kastoun is a multidisciplinary visual artist, a graduate of Fine Arts University of Damascus in 2011, and is currently concluding her higher education in art history and curatorial studies at the American University of Beirut. Resident in Beirut since 2013, Kastoun was involved in various collaborative activist artistic practices as part of the Haven for Artists community. She continues to explore the hybrid potentials behind artistic, cultural, and theoretical practices in the region through her current work with Ettijahat - Independent Culture.

Thomas Gardner (MA Sound Arts course leader) is a composer, improviser, teacher, computer programmer and academic. His work is particularly concerned with the relations between sound art and music, focusing on group interaction and the kinds of changes introduced by electronic media. His work with the performance group Automatic Writing Circle (AWC), which he co-founded in 2007, has been a key way to explore these issues in practice and consists of the composition of new work, improvisation, the design of instruments and software, and the exploration of new performance contexts. Thomas’s compositions have been performed internationally at venues including: the Sibelius Academy, Dartington Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Alte-Schmiede Vienna and the Salla Chavez in Mexico City.

Alma Žero teaches courses in foreign language education, inclusion, and human rights at the University of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is Education Coordinator for Western Balkans with the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights, Applied Drama and Arts-Integrated Teaching Fellow, and USHMM Fellow. Alma is particularly interested in exploring how arts integration supports teacher professional learning and encourages inclusive policies and practices in post-conflict education.

Professor Angus Carlyle is a researcher and Co-Director at CRiSAP at the University of the Arts, London, where he is Professor of Sound and Landscape.His work explores environments and atmospheres as embodiments of stress and relief, with listening becoming writing, recordings, photographs and films. Angus edited the book Autumn Leaves (2007) and co-edited On Listening (2013) and co-wrote In The Field (2013). His art works have included 51° 32 ' 6.954” N / 0° 00 ' 47.0808” W” (part of the Sound Proof group show (2008)), the CD Some Memories of Bamboo (2009) and Acqua Bianca (part of the Caroussa Sonore project, (2012 – 2013)). He completed a sixth month residency project called "Viso Come Territorio" / "Face As Territory" exploring life in a village on a Southern Italian hillside and the ongoing work from this project has become a flag, some field signals and, most importantly, a film collaboration with Chiara Caterina. His most important work, Air Pressure, a collaboration  with anthropologist Rupert Cox led to an installation (part of the Asia Triennial Manchester), a CD/booklet and a film which has toured internationally. Cox and Carlyle are starting to develop a new project based on the island of Okinawa.

Professor Cathy Lane is an artist, composer and academic. She works primarily in sound, combining oral history, archival recordings, spoken word and environmental recordings to investigate histories, environments, our collective and individual memories and the forces that shape them. She is inspired by places or themes which are rooted in everyday experience and particularly interested in ‘hidden histories’ and historical amnesia and how this can be investigated from a feminist perspective through the medium of composed sound. Most of her work in in the form of gallery installations, concert pieces, books and essays. Books include: Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice  (RGAP, 2008) and, with Angus Carlyle, In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews about field recording in contemporary sound art; On Listening (2013) essays about how listening is used in a wide variety of disciplines and Sound Arts Now (2021), an exploration of contemporary artistic practice. Her CD The Hebrides Suite, explores aspects of life, past and present, in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, through the medium of composed sound. Cathy Lane is Professor of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London and directs Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) a UAL research centre.

Chair: Syma Tariq is an artist-researcher based in London who works with aural archives, audio experimentation, field recording and writing, collaborating with platforms including Colomboscope festival, Nottingham Contemporary, Radio Al-Hara and World Records. Her recently completed PhD focused on the 1947 Partition of British India and its 'sonic' condition, leading to her ongoing project Partitioned Listening.