SONIC MATTER – Openlab : The Witness

Body and Being (c) Chaoba Thiyam

Founded by Julie Beauvais, Katharina Rosenberger and Lisa Nolte in 2020, SONIC MATTER Platform  began as an invitation to go on a common journey of discovery, exploration and creation in the field of experimental music. SONIC MATTER offers a space for urgent contemporary issues that can be negotiated jointly by artists and audiences over long periods of time. Sound is at the heart of SONIC MATTER. It is our constant companion, shaping our environment in ways that can be either striking or enigmatic, and that contains within it a multi-layered content: from the critical to the sensual, the unifying to the energetic, the contemplative to the danceable.

Openlab: The Witness, founded and directed by Julie Beauvais started in 2018, cooperates with different festivals and platforms and collaborates at the moment and for 3 years with SONIC MATTER. This long term project highlights the relationship between humans and our non-human kin. Around the world, transdisciplinary groups of artists, scientists, and activists in collaboration with their local communities, are listening to our imperiled planet’s messages around potential collapse — or hope for rehabilitation. Their research, which incorporates audio, video, text, and other creative platforms, implores us to witness what may disappear forever, as well as build, with great urgency, new networks of caregiving for the earth. Openlab: The Witness shares this research through an interactive global map.

Openlab : The Witness is open to contributions from audiences. Visitors can participate either as listeners or as partners in a dialogue, while artists can also take part in projects that suit their particular talents. Submit your contributions here.

JULIE BEAUVAIS
Co-founder of SONIC MATTER Platform and director of Openlab : The Witness – Julie Beauvais explores new perspectives on transnational cooperation for sustainable development. An artist, director and curator, her body of work ranges from opera, theatre and choreographic works, to performative installations and transterritorial cooperation programs.
See the SONIC MATTER team here.

CHAOBA THIYAM
Chaoba Thiyam is a multidisciplinary artist from Manipur in India. He is the Creative Director of SIYOM. Conceptualized as a “space,” SIYOM symbolizes the womb, the wellspring of creative spirit. SIYOM is the inspirational space, a confluence of creative forces encompassing the whole range of art forms, from the traditional to the unconventional, from the structured to the experimental. Listen to Chaoba Thiyam’s work here.