A Picture Book Journey
Spore hosts
Save the Date
Burning Silence
A two-day symposium on fire ecologies and sound
12. April 2026
13.00-21.00
13.00-21.00
Save the Date
For free
for adults
in English
How to listen to a world on fire?
Burning Silence explores the threshold between fire and silence, tracing how environmental destruction and resistance register across material, affective, and media ecologies. Burning manifests as wildfires intensified by extraction, as the combustion of petrocapitalist economies, as the noise and smoke of war and colonialism – but also as burns that regenerate soil and lifeworlds, and as the visceral heat of anger, grief, and demands for justice.
Against and within this burning, silence appears as both violence and refusal: the erasure of voices affected by destruction, but also tactical withdrawal that claims political agency. Silence also becomes the threshold for attuning to more-than-human frequencies – the lower registers that linger in soil, water, and air, pushed beneath perceptibility by dominant modes of listening.
The symposium is a space for cultivating conditions for slow listening, transversal thinking, and situated engagement. It brings together listening sessions, sound and lecture performances and conversations.
Curated by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Yasemin Keskintepe; with Areej Ashhab, Sanaz Azimipour, Asia Bazdyrieva, Cooking With Mama, Silvia Dal Dosso, eeefff, Jonathan W. Y. Gray, Edka Jarząb, Valentina Karga, Garance Maurer, Ariel William Orah, Otucha Collective, Pisitakun, Nour Sokhon and Sinthujan Varatharajah.
PROGRAM DAY 2
(For full programme descriptions, click here:)
Sunday
1 pm – 5 pm | Valentina Karga, Adaptation (Pre-registration until 10.04 under burningsilence.art@gmail.com — drop-in according to capacity)
Live Action Role Play (LARP), Classroom
1 pm – 2:45 pm | Wild Fires: Walking Burn Scars, Listening Across Flames – conversation between Garance Maurer and Jonathan W. Y. Gray
Conversation, Atrium
3 pm – 3:45 pm | Ariel William Orah, Subdued Residue: Listening After Geneva (1967)
Lecture Performance, Auditorium
4 pm – 5:15 pm | What Burns Through Colonial Infrastructures — a conversation with Asia Bazdyrieva and Areej Ashhab
Conversation, Auditorium
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm | eeefff, Bar "POTASSIUM"
Lecture Performance, Auditorium
5:30 pm – 6:15 pm | Jonathan W.Y. Gray, regathering #wildfires
Listening Session, Classroom
6:45 pm – 7:15 pm | Otucha Collective with Mina Dordević, Magda Jaroszewicz, Agnieszka Kucharska, Julia Legeżyńska, Doro Michalak, Liene Šilde, Ola Zielińska
Performance, Atrium
7:30 pm – 9 pm | So far, so near: Cooking with Mama: Agirê Jiyan, Жива Ватра with Yuliia Kishchuk and Saki
Community gathering, Atrium
In collaboration with So far, So near: Entangled struggles, fragile connections, 16.5.2026 at Spore, curated by Tanja Sokolnykova, Natalya Stupka and Mariia Vorotilina
Both days
Garance Maurer, I am soaking in the thickness of fires
Installation, Atrium
