Steve Goodman (Kode9), Gascia Ouzounian, Stas Shärifullá (HMOT), Bint Mbareh, Ján Solčáni (Curator and Moderator)

In what ways is sound used to shape how contemporary military conflicts are operated, and to what extent is our ability to listen framed by the politics of colonialism? This year’s NEXT Festival symposium brings together Bint Mbareh, Steve Goodman (Kode9), Gascia Ouzounian, Stas Shärifullá (HMOT) and Ján Solčáni to explore through lectures, discussion and workshop how sound can become an instrument of oppression and power.

Admission is free; no festival pass is needed. The symposium will be held in English.

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PROGRAMME:

Workshop Bint Mbareh – re-choir-ed presence
FRIDAY 28.11. / 16:00-18:00 / Performatív, Štúdio 12, Jakubovo nám. 12

Talks
SATURDAY 29.11. / 10:00-15:00 / Štúdio 12, Jakubovo nám. 12

10:00 Opening

10:15 Steve Goodman – Sonic Warfare 2025
Tones, drones, booms, blasts and decoys – this lecture will discuss deployments of sound in conflict, the atmosphere of fear they produce, the epistemological problems they pose and the ways they resonate in the planetary networks our contemporary polycrisis.

11:10 Gascia Ouzounian – City of Waves: Atmospheric Occupation in Beirut
This talk traces a shift in colonial occupation and warfare—from early twentieth-century aerial policing, which treated cities as surfaces to be monitored and struck, to occupation of a city’s very air and atmosphere as a means of saturating everyday life with violence. I argue that this shift signals a move toward more insidious forms of violence: the “slow violence of the everyday, the nonevent” (Calvillo).
Drawing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan and the sonic investigation agency Earshot’s Air Pressure project, I propose atmospheric occupation as a way to describe how Beirut’s airs are persistently unsettled as part of a political project designed to engineer disorder. In dialogue with the work of artists and writers including Rayya Badran, Nadim Mishlawi, and Mhamad Safa, I extend this inquiry to sonic residues: lingering sounds and vibrations that accumulate as a kind of sonic weather, shaping affective and political climates. I analyse these residues through a “dark meteorology” of sound attuned to perturbations and disturbances that endure.
Finally, I chart a broader shift in urban imaginaries—from the classical city-as-grid to the contemporary city-as-field, an indeterminate zone of intra-acting forces. I argue that governments and militaries increasingly conceptualise cities as assemblages of waves, signals, and flows that can be manipulated or disrupted for political and military ends, and that wave mechanics—turbulencing, pressurising, radiating harm—are mobilised to enact forms of violence that slip beneath sensory thresholds while unfolding across spatial and geological scales.

12:00-13:00 Lunch Break

13:00 Stas Shärifullá – Sonorous Şifr: Three Exercises in Critical Listening  (Listening Session/Sound Exercise)
We will work through three recordings related to the so-called “indigenous” and the so-called “traditional” sonic practices from North and Central Asia. Through the collective listening experience, we will try to understand how sounds that were intentionally “emptied,” şafira, are encrypted with the void, transforming into an immaterial yet still sonorous emptiness — “zero,” şifr — resisting any attempts to capture them with “hungry” recording devices and “tin” colonial ears.

13:55 Panel Discussion (w/ Steve Goodman, Gascia Ouzounian, Stas Shärifullá, Bint Mbareh) + Audience Q&A
Moderated by Ján Solčáni

15:00 Closing

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Supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council and Bratislava City Foundation.