For SOMA, artist Yen Chun Lin presents a new sonic piece exploring interspecies communication through silence and sound. What silence means to humans may not coincide with how it is perceived by other beings. Serpents, for instance, sense not only airborne sound but also groundborne vibrations. In her dream, a small wet black snake visited, communicating feelings and memories in silence. Developed through dream-listening and attunement to non-human frequencies, the work carries interspecies breath through Paiwan’s flutes—tuning serpent and human with a single, synchronized breath—and transforming the space into a quiet, immersive cocoon where sound becomes a shared language across dimensions.

Yen Chun Lin is a Berlin-based Taiwanese artist whose practice dwells in the state of falling—falling into sleep, into wakefulness, into the unknown. In her Synsleep Listening Experiment, she encountered a dragonfly. Guided by this delicate companion, she explores various nuanced states of being and becoming within their shared environments. These encounters become portals through which she attunes to the subtle vibrations of existence and the shifting edges of perception. Yen focuses on the tenuous and sensuous space of sound and consciousness. Often inspired by the hypnotic yet awakening rhythms found in nature, her sonic compositions invite audiences to slip into a collective dream. Her works have been exhibited and performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, MONOM Berlin, Creamcake Berlin, Norbergfestival, SAVVY Contemporary, Skanes Konstförening Malmö, and CAC Vilnius, 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.