Symposium – Listening to Post-Nature
With Susan Schuppli, Raviv Ganchrow, Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar, Yuri Tuma and Ján Solčáni
This summer, I flew from Manchester to Berlin, leaving on one of the hottest days ever measured locally for a city about to set a record of its own, close to 40°C.
The effects hit quickly. On descent, the plane ran into a heavy storm, severe enough to force an emergency landing several hours from my destination. The train onward was cancelled due to the heatwave, as was the following one. Meanwhile, the market logic powering the ticketing algorithm registered the surge in demand and pumped up the prices. Ticket in hand, I squeezed into an overcrowded train alongside other passengers, only to be told that it would not move until some of us got off. After a long stillness along the carriages, it was the police who finally removed us. Uniformed bodies pushing others, dead tired, back onto the melting asphalt of the platform became an embodied demonstration that the partition between a thinking subject and matter does not hold. The romanticised image of nature as a pristine, separate, and harmonious superorganism, distinct from the civilised, the cultural and the rational, cannot account for a situation in which weather intensified by human emissions prompts state authorities to put on tactical gloves.
Instead of framing the environment as an external object – a detached whole, aestheticised and preserved within patriarchal dynamics – we need to understand it as interconnected, lacking a centre, edges or hierarchies. In this spirit, Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar (University of Cambridge; Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) follows a stray dog, a cetacean and a rock mound, listening to their embodied evidence of land extraction and militarisation. Listening is further treated as a situated practice through ice. Through its fractures and cracks, and the slow release of air bubbles trapped for thousands of years, Susan Schuppli (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths; Forensic Architecture) reads ice in India, Canada and Svalbard as a material witness capable of revealing climate change. And how are these changes refracted by those who inhabit vast bodies of salt water? Raviv Ganchrow (Institute of Sonology; Center for Advanced Studies, Humboldt University) travels to the southern territories of Tierra del Fuego to listen with whales through his technological ear, investigating the planetary mesh that orchestrates their vocalisations.
Nature could no longer serve as the silent backdrop of the modernist construct, and I could no longer remain a detached observer. From a dog roaming the oil-soaked fields around Baku, to villagers in the north-eastern Himalayas listening to the melting glaciers that cause their water shortages, to a sound wave reflected off the ocean floor, I am constantly transformed, both culturally and physically. Yuri Tuma (Institute for Postnatural Studies) takes this condition – the listener remade by what resounds through their body – as a vector for dismantling the romanticised soundscape. He traces ‘Nature’ as a cultural construct, asking what shifts when the exterior meets our emotions, memories, and dreams.
This year, the NEXT Symposium invites you to listen to a nature that can no longer be separated from human activity.
(Ján Solčáni)
PROGRAMME:
Workshop
Yuri Tuma – The Way We Sound: An Exercise on Queer Listening
FRIDAY 27.11.2026, 15:00–18:00 / tranzit.sk, Beskydská 3134/12
Talks
SATURDAY 28.11.2026, 10:00–15:30 / TU-BA, Štúrova 12/4
10:00 Opening
with an introduction by Ján Solčáni
10:00–10:15 Yuri Tuma – Postnatural Soundscapes
The idea of a romanticised nature as a background scenario or neutral framework where human activity occurs is no longer valid and must be replaced by a broader, more complex reflection. During this interactive and sensorial talk, “Nature” will be explored as one of the main cultural constructions of modernity, focusing on contemporary perspectives that address environmental and ecological issues and foster interspecies relationships between humans, non-humans, matter, and technologies. To blur these boundaries further, we will focus especially on sound ecologies. From the tiniest microorganisms to the vast expanse of matter, we are constantly transformed, both mentally and physically, by the sonic and cultural vibrations of our urban and natural environments. What changes can manifest when we understand the ecological entanglements between the exterior acoustic environment and the frequencies of our emotions, memories, and dreams?
11:15–12:00 Susan Schuppli – Listening to ice
This talk focuses on the many different ways in which acoustics and ice-based research combine to produce new insights into our contemporary climatic conditions. It emerges primarily out of Sasan’s collaborative fieldwork in India, Canada and Svalbard.
12:00–13:00 Lunch break
13:00–13:45 Raviv Ganchrow – Hearing Thalassic
How does mammalian hearing transform when moving underwater? How do whale sounds refract planetary transformations? What’s the futurity of hearing thalassic? This talk will share recent insights from Whale Refractions research, drawing on custom-built ultra-broadband hydrophones and an experimental underwater listening station in the Straits of Magellan, investigating the manners in which whale vocalisations, underwater topography and planetary heritage entwine in the Chilean sub-Antarctic.
13:55–14:40 Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar – The Eavesdropper
Usually understood to be an agent of the state, a blackmailer or corporate competitor, the eavesdropper is a fraught figure. They are seen to practice a hostile, suspicious, even malicious form of listening, closely tied to espionage and surveillance on behalf of those in power. This talk reimagines the eavesdropper as a potential comrade in arms, connecting practices of overhearing and incidental listening with a more militant and fugitive history. In particular, the talk examines the kind of eavesdropping which happens near sites of extraction and militarisation – by both more-than-human beings and the technologies aiming to capture more-than-human communication and life. Through the stray dog, cetacean, and the rock mound, the eavesdropper turns into a witness, attester and a radical informant, performing essential sonic countersurveillance of an array of violent industries and practices – from resource extraction to military build-up and re-armament. The audience will be privy to sounds captured in the oilfields of the Caspian, the guided missile ranges of the Hebridean archipelago, the exposed riverbanks of the Danube, and the wargaming seas of far-northern Scotland.
14:50–15:30 Panel Discussion + Audience Q&A
moderated by Ján Solčáni
15:30 Closing and goodbye
Admission is free; no festival pass is needed. The symposium will be held in English.
This symposium was made possible thanks to the support of Skupina and TU-BA, as well as the financial support of the Bratislava City Foundation.