A project by OTO Sound Museum
Curated by Zaira Oram

The curatorial collective Zaira Oram presents the work of artist Abdellah M. Hassak Giving Earth & Dividing Waters (2021) that condenses explorations of Northern European waters and North African soil. This experimental sonic work is the culmination of a possible narration between these two territories: more specifically, the Netherlands and the artist’s native land, Morocco. Far from being simple sound recordings, these audio fragments serve as vessels for layered and even future conversations, reflecting around the interconnected themes of water, landscape, and worldview. The sounds featured in the piece were captured using a hydrophone, drawing in the subterranean murmurs of Moroccan soil and the flowing currents of Dutch waters. Installed in the BACKROOM, the piece invites the listener to engage in a form of attuned listening, where meaning emerges not from clarity, but from resonance.

Abdellah M. Hassak (1984, Morocco) is a sound artist, new media and music producer as well as art director. His research explores processes of participative sonic mapping at the urban level, integrating sound, daily technologies and radio as tools to foster agency. His work takes the form of performances and installations that include sound objects.

OTO SOUND MUSEUM is a nomadic space dedicated to fostering sound experimentation and amplifying voices. Founded with the mission of producing, disseminating, and collecting recent or unpublished sound works, the museum invites contemporary artists from different backgrounds, geographies and generations. Iconoclastic in nature, the museum was born digitally in 2020 as a utopian architecture aiming to host sound exhibitions accessible on this platform from all over the world.
In the past years OTO SOUND MUSEUM developed projects at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Migration Museum in Zurich, La Voirie in Biel/Bienne, La rada in Locarno, Wasserturm Zurich, Sonic Matter Zurich, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’Art Contemporain, Klang Moor Schopfe, Biennales Festival für audiovisuelle Kunst in Gais and Biennale Son Valais.

Zaira Oram is a curatorial collective founded by Francesca Ceccherini and joined by members Francesca Brusa, Chloe Dall’Olio, Elisa Bernardoni etc. It is engaged in experimental displays across visual arts, performance, sound, and data. Her work weaves the themes of memory and identity, marginalisation and resistance, rituality and healing with artistic processes. Zaira Oram is the mother of OTO Sound Museum since 2020.

SOMA 2024/2025

We listen in order to interpret our world and experience meaning
– Pauline Oliveros

Sound is a powerful medium. It’s omnipresent. It has a material-affective power of socio-cultural and political significance. How do you listen? When do you really hear?
Nested in the BACKROOM of KRONE COURONNE, SOMA is a vibrating listening platform that accommodates the practice and research of sound artists through 2024/2025. SOMA investigates the emancipatory and transformative potential of sound and listening practices.
Conceived as a result of curator Kristina Grigorjeva’s research and together with Ivan Crichton and Laurens Dekeyzer, SOMA invites to listen, linger, vibrate and hear collectively in a shared, plural, response-able and care-full context.

SOMA is about listening as a transformative social practice and a relational way of hearing the world. In a text referring to Audre Lorde’s “The Masters tools will never dismantle the Master’s House” (1984), sound anthropologist Steven Feld suggests that we need to develop a different set of tools in order to listen to (as opposed to merely hearing) signs and signifiers, songs and birds and insects in a relational practice that performs a sonic phenomenology of the forest we are part of; through touch, smell and sound. Sounding as a “listening with”–from the somatic, interceptive to the social body.

SOMA is supported by Migros Culture Percentage, Pro Helvetia, GVB-Kulturstiftung and Ernst Göhner Stiftung.