From April 19th-21st, Timespan (UK) will host a sound festival dedicated to sound practices aimed at exploring utopias and futures. The festival is co-curated with Giulia Gregnanin, director of Timespan and ALMARE.
We are all excited to present Becoming Futures a weekend-long festival dedicated to the exploration of science fiction, psychopolitical narratives, and utopias of revolt through sound. The festival responds to ALMARE’s project Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., created thanks to the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council (2022), the programme for the international promotion of Italian contemporary art.
The festival line-up features Radiophrenia’s Mark Vernon, ALMARE, Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, Steve Goodman (Kode9), and us, bringing an incredible selection of national and international sound artists and practitioners to the Highlands. Over the course of the weekend, through free workshops, screenings, and a rich programme of events the audience is invited to collectively reflect on how the imagining of multiple futures can contribute to revolutionising the present, transforming the utopias into a rebellious mode of possibility (José Esteban Muñoz), and into something habitable in the here and now (Ursula K. Le Guin).
The weekend will begin on Friday 19th with Mark Vernon presenting a curated listening session of audio work related to the theme of future from the sound archive of Radiophrenia: an art radio station broadcasting from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts promoting radio as an art form. Saturday 20th Heritage Curator Jacquie Aitken will lead the audience to the Souterrain at Caen Burn to explore the concept of archaeoacustic and the use of this sound practice to reflect on issues such as climate change and the threat posed by developments to archaeological sites. ALMARE and Radio papesse will join the conversation introducing archaeoacustic as a starting point for the sci-fi narrative of Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U.
ollowing, Scottish-Zimbabwean writer and artist Natasha Thembiso Ruwona will present mapping a black sonic geography, a performative lecture detailing the development process of her new work studying Black sound through the idea of ‘troubling’ to disrupt and refuse colonial structures. In the afternoon, musician, writer and artist Steve Goodman will screen his science fiction video-essay Astro-Darien which questions the possible disintegration of the UK unfolding from the failed 17th c Darian Scheme and mixing with it the contemporary tenders to build a vertical satellite launch station in the Highlands.
ALMARE will return in the evening with the presentation of Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U. a sci-fi film and audio novel inspired by pseudo-scientific theory of archaeoacoustics which hypothesised the possibility of extracting sound from objects. Set in an imaginary society the film follows the adventures of researcher Dorothea Ïesj as she extracts (and resells) sounds from the past investigating the use of archives and memory as instruments of power and control. Life Chronicles comes after ALMARE’s residency at Timespan and it is created thanks to the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council (2022), the programme for the international promotion of Italian contemporary art.
The screening will be followed by a night of entertainment including the Helmsdale Choir, a performance by artist Edwyn Collins, and a Ceilidh.
The festival will close the next day with the listening session A Living Archive For the Future led by Radio Papesse. The session is an invitation to explore audio stories and pieces of documentaries, sci-fictions, and experimental sound, loosely connected to ideas of utopia, futuring, resistance and imagination.
Please visit TIMESPAN.ORG.UK for more information and to reserve free tickets for the activities.
Becoming Futures is kindly supported by the Italian Institute of Culture Edinburgh, and the continuous support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council (2022), the programme for the international promotion of Italian contemporary art.
BIOS
Timespan is a cultural organisation in Helmsdale (Scotland, UK) with local, global and planetary ambitions to utilise culture for social change following principles of equality, emancipation and inclusion. Comprising a local history museum, contemporary art programme, geology and herb gardens, shop, bakery and café; Timespan adopts a holistic and integrated approach to making art and heritage tools for global cultural and social change. The organisation is committed to diagnosing and responding to urgent contemporary issues, which are rooted in the local context of remote, rural Scotland, and approaching these from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
Mark Vernon is a sound artist and radio producer whose work explores ideas of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and the re-appropriation of found sounds. He runs and co-curates the Glasgow art radio station and festival, Radiophrenia and the open submission listening event Lights Out Listening Group.
Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – an annual two-week long exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station promotes radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. Each year, the broadcast schedule includes a series of newly commissioned radio works, live shows, pre-recorded features and a series of Live-to-Air performances. The majority of the program is made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound art and radio works.
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is a Scottish-Zimbabwean writer, artist and researcher based between London and Scotland. Using spatial practice and Afrofuturism as guides, her work contemplates place, time and memory as they relate to environmental relationships. mapping a black sonic geography is a performative lecture detailing the research and development process so far of a new work in progress A Troubling, Or, A Sonic Refusal.
The film is a study of Black sound through the idea of ‘troubling’. A conscious or responsive enactment of a troubling practice serves as a refusal to colonial structures, creating a disruption or a glitch in a system, or an environment. Troubling in this case is defined as constructive instead of a problem, or something to be fixed. Within this, the film aims to broaden discussions of place, race and time, using sound as its starting point. The research and development of A Troubling, Or, A Sonic Refusal is currently supported by the FLAMIN Fellowship.
Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) is a musician, writer and artist. He is the author of the book Sonic Warfare (MIT Press, 2010) and co-edited the book Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic Press, 2019), Sonic Faction (Urbanomic Press, 2024) and Ø (Flatlines Press, 2021) He is founder of the labels Hyperdub and Flatlines, producer of 5 albums, 2 with the late Spaceape (Memories of the Future, 2006 and Black Sun 2012) and 3 solo (Nothing, 2015, Escapology 2022, Astro-Darien 2022), and numerous DJ mix compilations. In addition, he has produced sound installations for the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern (2018) and for the More than Human exhibition (2019) on artificial intelligence at the Barbican in London. The video version of Astro-Darien was first shown at Elevator, Shanghai November 2023.
ALMARE is an artists-curators collective focused on contemporary practices using sound as an expressive medium. Founded in Turin in 2017 by Amos Cappuccio, Giulia Mengozzi, Luca Morino and Gabbi Cattani, ALMARE works in curating, writing, music and publishing, and organises exhibitions, public talks and performance programs.