The fourth episode of SOMA welcomes composer, performer and visual artist Raven Chacon, born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, in the Southwest United States. His work lies at the crossroads of sound art and music composition and here, Chacon presents a sound work based on field recordings of the shifting ice, wildlife, and modern tools in the overwhelmingly harsh environment of the Canadian Arctic, giving a sonic glimpse of a place where humans are rarely present.

Nested in the BACKROOM of KRONE COURONNE, SOMA is a vibrating listening platform that accommodates the practice and research of sound artists through 2025. Built as a result of curator Kristina Grigorjeva’s research that investigates the emancipatory and transformative potential of different listening practices, SOMA invites to listen, linger, vibrate and hear collectively in a shared, plural, response-able and care-full context.

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.

Raven Chacon (1977, Navajo Nation, US) is a composer, performer, and visual artist born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. He received a BA (2001) from the University of New Mexico and an MFA (2004) from the California Ins-titute of the Arts. From 2009 to 2018, he was a member of the art collective Postcommodity. In his practice, he cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music to contemplate, question and re-imagine the histories of the contested lands. His work has been presented worldwide at numerous venues and festi-vals, including Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York; Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø; the Los Ange-les County Museum of Art; the 2022 Whitney Biennial; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; SITE Santa Fe; The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Vancouver Art Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and Borea-lis Festival, Bergen, Norway. In 2022, Raven Chacon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass and in 2023 he received the MacArthur Fellowship. He lives and works in New York.

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.