A Picture Book Journey
Spore hosts
Save the Date
Burning Silence
A two-day symposium on fire ecologies and sound
11. April 2026
12.00-21.00
12.00-21.00
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 Ashab, 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 1
(For full programme descriptions, click here:)
Saturday
12:00 – 1:15 pm | Burning Silence
Collective reading with the curators, Yasemin Keskintepe and Hanna Grześkiewicz
Reader contributions by Areej Ashhab, Chris Cameron, Meryem Rosita Kalayci, AM Kanngieser, Brandon LaBelle, Ariel William Orah, Pisitakun, Yuri Tuma, Mia Yu
Collective Reading, Atrium
1:30 – 3:15 pm | So far, so near: Decolonial Voices from Eastern Europe, Caucasus, North and Central Asia in Polylogue
with Oksana Potapova (moderator), Antonina Stebur, Giorgi Rodionov, Seseg Jigjitova and Diana Kudaibergenova
Conversation, Atrium
In collaboration with So Far, So Near: Entangled Struggles, Fragile Connections, 16.5.2026 at Spore, curated by Tanja Sokolnykova, Natalya Stupka, Mariia Vorotilina
3:00 – 3:30 pm & 4:30 – 5:00 pm | Edka Jarząb, You'll go up the mountain, I'll go through the valley
Listening Session, Classroom
3:30 – 4:15 pm | Silvia Dal Dosso, The Weird Whale Song – A Special Preview of Unknown Origins
Performance, Auditorium
4:30 – 5:15 pm | Pisitakun, Politics of Silence
Listening Session, Auditorium
5:30 – 7:00 pm | Burning Silence – Panel discussion on the crisis of solidarity with Sanaz Azimipour and Sinthujan Varatharajah
Panel Discussion, Auditorium
7:15 – 7:45 pm | Edka Jarząb, You'll go up the mountain, I'll go through the valley
Performance, Atrium
8:00 – 8:45 pm | Nour Sokhon, Revisiting: Resisting Turbulence
Performance, Auditorium
Both days
Garance Maurer, I am soaking in the thickness of fires
Installation, Atrium
