Ecotones: Investigating Sounds and Territories

Edited by Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau and Peter Szendy

Published by Spector Books

The Luxembourg Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale is an invitation to close our eyes and actively listen. The installation hosted in the pavilion, Sonic Investigations, operates a radical shift away from the visual: it offers a cartography of various environments exclusively through sound. The volume, conceived as a companion to the sound installation in Venice, has a broad ambition: it argues for a counter-project to the hegemony of images.

Since the climate crisis can also be understood as a crisis of sensory perception and representation, it is all the more urgent to find new ways of approaching the ongoing environmental transformations. The act of listening allows for different forays into both anthropic and natural ecosystems. It directs our attention toward the vocality of other-than-human agencies; it empowers them with a voice of their own.

Field recording can thus be the prelude to another mapping of the world, attuning our ears to its various fault lines, to its tensions. And sounding becomes a powerful investigative tool, a way of auscultating the infrastructures of the present as well as the times to come. The concept of ecotone, a transitional space between two ecosystems, is a guiding thread for the authors of this volume as they listen to boundaries between territories, to urban patterns, to natural balances and imbalances, or to political fractures.

The book includes contributions by Peter Szendy, Shannon Mattern, Tim Ingold, Soline Nivet and Ariane Wilson, David George Haskell, Ludwig Berger, Philip Samartzis and Madelynne Cornish (Bogong Centre for Sound Culture), Nadine Schütz, Laure Brayer (AAU-CRESSON), Julia Grillmayr, Christina Gruber and Sophia Rut (Lobau Listening Comprehensions), Yuri Tuma (Institute for Postnatural Studies), Emma McCormick Goodhart, as well as a fiction piece by Xabi Molia and poems by Laura Vazquez and Cole Swensen. The graphic identity is designed by Pierre Vanni.

Public events of Sonic Investigations, Luxembourg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
The activations extend the reflection on embodied practices and sensorial approaches to space through sound, offering a unique exploration of the performer’s and the audience’s body within soundscapes. The events will create a dialogue between the space of the pavilion and the infrastructural apparatus of the Venetian lagoon, together with local Italian sound artists and researchers.

October 7–10, 2025
Ecotongues (Residency and Performance inside the pavilion): Gaia Ginevra Giorgi (author, sound artist and performer)
Ecotongues explores mediumship as the ability to inhabit the threshold between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, as a performative practice of interspecific intimacy between human and more-than-human entities.

October 25–26, 2025
Attunement Exercises: Nicola Di Croce (researcher and sound artist)
The two public exercises address the idea of ‘attunement’ as the possibility of entering ‘into resonance with’ the non-human, through an investigation of the sound sources of the Venice lagoon taking particularly into account the infrastructure systems and their relation to wilder ecosystems.

19th International Venice Architecture Biennale, Luxembourg Pavilion, Arsenale, Sale d’Armi, 1st floor / May 10–November 23, 2025.
Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau with Ludwig Berger, Peter Szendy: Sonic Investigations

Commissioners appointed by the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture: Kultur | lx—Arts Council Luxembourg, LUCA—Luxembourg Center for Architecture / Curators: Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau / Exhibitors: Valentin Bansac, Ludwig Berger, Anthea Caddy, Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau, Peter Szendy / Visual identity: Pierre Vanni.

Press contact: Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg
Emilie Gouleme, emilie.gouleme [​at​] kulturlx.lu,  T +352 621 680 028