Antonia Alampi – ‘Everywhere is a here, isn’t it?’ On Toxic Entanglements

Sonic Acts Podcast

‘Everywhere is a here, isn’t it?’ On Toxic Entanglements by Antonia Alampi SONIC ACTS BIENNIAL 2022 15 October 2022 – Likeminds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ‘Human actors strive to interpret, define, or contain the toxic, but how are they also acted upon? Or [...] what happens when the dump is in us? What is the duality of contamination that emerges when we think of toxicity as an ongoing and morphing process?’ (Chloe Taft, ‘What is TOXIC?’, TOXIC: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance, 2016, New Haven) Practitioners from various disciplines have long been engaged in exposing experiences of toxicity. At the heart of many such endeavours is the necessity of finding ways to make visible the complex entanglements of toxicity: of seemingly distant geographies and places; of the different reasons and interests that lie behind the manufacturing of toxicity; of the ways found to bypass national and transnational legislations; of the forms of collaboration between state apparatuses and organised crime in facilitating corporate interests at the expense of people. This talk starts with the toxic events in Alampi’s hometown, in a little village in Calabria, and moves on to discuss platforms such as Toxic Commons and the exhibitions ‘Deadly Affairs’ at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp and ‘The Long Term You Cannot Afford’ at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. What may emerge are similarities, more than differences, and proximity, more than distance. Everything being closer, way closer than one may think. Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 took place at various locations in Amsterdam, interweaving an exhibition, sound performances and discourse programme, accompanied by artist presentations, workshops, excursions and more. As a part of the Biennial programme, the Leaving Traces symposium opened up a forum in which to become attentive to pollution’s invisible, yet harmful touch. Actively rethinking our relation to the climate and our planetary legacies, an array of artists, researchers, curators, and scholars spoke of the many faces of toxicity – from fossil fuels to plastic, from nuclear energy to chemical pollutants. The gathering staged real stories and events of exposure, thinking about ‘leaving traces’ not just as the material act of spreading toxicity, but as art’s potential to reach out and act as a disruptive force in the world. Find out more at https://sonicacts.com/archive/biennial2022 Curation & production: Sonic Acts Recording: Engage! TV https://engagetv.com Sound mastering: Monty Mouw http://flippendisks.com Design: Catalogtree https://catalogtree.net Sound logo: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros http://www.vivapunani.org/