The third episode of SOMA welcomes Berlin-based musician and sound artist Jessica Ekomane. She creates situations where the sound acts as a transformative element for the space and the audience. The piece Figures / Ground (2018) starts with regular impulses that beat together, slowly shifting apart until they bloom into an ever-changing rhythmic pattern, before finally going back to unison. According to Ekomane, this polyphony addresses the classic separation between mind and body, with influences from Gestalt psychology and music of the people of Cameroon and the Congo. Thus addressing a multitude of voices that respond to and complete each other.

Listening sessions

Thu, 12.12.2024, 19:00

Sa, 11.1.2025
19:30 Somatic Rituals
21:00 DJ christamadenico
22.30 DJ dekejzer

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. 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.

Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. She creates situa- tions where the sound acts as a transformative element for the space and the audience. Her quadraphonic per- formances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacous- tics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the inter- change of noise and melody. Ekomane’s ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in ques- tions such as the relationship between individual per- ception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots. Her work has been extensively presented in venues such as Ham- burger Bahnhof, Reina Sofia, Kanal Pompidou, Art Basel, Villa Massimo, CTM Festival, Cafe OTO, Gedächtniskir- che Berlin... She was one of the composers selec- ted by Natascha Sadr Haghigian for her installation »Ankerzentrum« in the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2019.

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.

The exhibition is supported by Migros Culture Percentage, GVB-Kulturstiftung, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Stadt Biel/Bienne, Kanton Bern, Pro Helvetia, Gubler- Hablützel Stiftung, Temperatio, Burgergemeinde Bern, Ursula Wirz Stiftung.