Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure is a performance, sound, and video maker whose transdisciplinary practice materializes the fugitive points of friction between ecstasy and mourning, stillness and haunting. Through compositions that move across sonic, visual, and embodied registers, her work dwells in affective thresholds—those moments where language fails and the spectral becomes felt. By engaging with the blurred zones between presence and absence, Bonaventure interrogates how bodies, memories, and identities are mediated through sound and image.

In addressing the degrees of legibility suspended in our gazes, the diasporic imaginary, and the persistent complexities of representation, Bonaventure constructs expressive systems of repair—poetic architectures that reimagine subjectivity beyond the limits of legibility or containment. Her work often explores the tension between hyper-visibility and erasure, drawing from diasporic epistemologies to articulate speculative forms of being, remembering, and relating. Through these speculative gestures, she contemplates the singular not as isolation, but as a site of resonance, vulnerability, and resistance.

Her works and performances have been presented internationally at institutions including MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, ICA London and Miami, MCBA Museum Lausanne, Arsenic Theatre Lausanne, Tanzhaus Zürich, Gessnerallee Zürich, Friart Kunsthalle Fribourg, the Hartwig Art Foundation Amsterdam, and Berghain Berlin, among others.

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. KRONE COURONNE programme is supported by Stadt Biel/Bienne, Kanton Bern, Pro Helvetia, Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung and Temperatio.