klimaton - Listening to the Disappearing Landscape
Installation, Performance
Sun 12/10/2023
Mon 12/11/2023
Silent green, Berlin
The Klimaton is a unique musical instrument that scatters the melting landscape of the Arctic into space in the form of a sound body. In an attempt to make the climate crisis more tangible, the artist duo Softic, together with performer Mateja Meded, composers Daniel Dominguez Teruel and Thies Mynther, and authors Sivan Ben Yishai and Heike Geißler, have developed a performative setting with texts and sound compositions.
Artistic direction: Adnan Softic, Nina Softic
Texts: Sivan Ben Yishai, Heike Geißler, Adnan Softic
Composition: Thies Mynther, Daniel Dominguez Teruel
With Mateja Meded, Thies Mynther, Daniel Dominguez Teruel, Adnan Softic, Nina Softic
Video stage: komposter
Dramaturgy: Malte Ubenauf
klimaton - Listening to the Disappearing Landscape is a performance that deals with the problem of communicability of scientific facts. The project is based on an extraordinary event in scientific research: at the end of 2020, the MOSAiC research expedition returned from its Arctic voyage after more than a year of collecting data with a kilometre-long network of measuring stations. It is the largest scientific data collection within a single region and one of the last comprehensive inventories of a disappearing landscape that scientists believe is a "key witness to climate change".
Together with a group of MOSAiC scientists and the composer Thies Mynther, the artist duo Adnan Softic and Nina Softic have developed the sound object klimaton ARCTIC≈2020, which outputs the data from the Arctic as sound, thus creating a large-scale sonified portrait of the disappearing landscape. The sound object, which allows an open and playful approach to the data, is a hybrid between a sonification device and musical instrument.
The artist duo also understands the climate crisis as a crisis of culture. In the performance klimaton - Listening to the Disappearing Landscape, the klimaton ARCTIC≈2020 functions as a key protagonist. It is both object and subject, offering a concrete and abstract surface for reflection where knowing and not-knowing meet, overlap and battle. The challenge is to create new ideas and practices that help us think and feel distant and invisible worlds as an essential part of our own world.
