Sonic Memories: a knock, a boom, a song | Sonics & Scenics

14:00–15:00, Auditorium: Kitchen Conversation #3

Historian and theorist of sound, Gascia Ouzounian, invites musician and composer Barbara Kinga Majewska and artist working with sounds, stories and sensations Una Lee into a conversation on the ways remembered songs, sounds and stories infuse how we navigate spaces, buildings, cities. The starting points to this conversation are two new sound commissions for the Museum’s audio guide created by Barbara and Una, taking audiences on sonic journeys across concrete and imaginary staircases and passageways. 

15:30–16:30, Auxculto 
Listening session by Audiosphere Studio, led by Daniel Koniusz and Jakub Żwirełło

Auxculto is an initiative of students at the Audiosphere Studio at University of the Arts Poznań who shared a need for a deep, collective experience of music. The original collective was formed by Klaudia Jeleńska, Dawid Dzwonkowski and Jakub Żwirełło. Auxculto events are based on listening together to entire albums and other musical works and projects, under conditions fostering maximum focus and immersion in the sound. Their practice was inspired by the audiophile tradition, and by the concept of “deep listening,” which stresses conscious, careful attunement to sounds, while minimizing visual stimuli.

Auxculto sessions are diverse, and held in a variety of spaces, but always exhibit concern for the comfort of the participants, limiting distractions and creating an atmosphere encouraging full engagement in reception of the music. After the session, invitees share their impressions, reflections and emotions, thus building a community of listeners.

At the next session of Auxculto at MSN Warsaw, we will listen together to the album Aguirre by the German group Popol Vuh. This was the group’s seventh album, but also served as the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The album, released in 1975, contains works used in the film as well as compositions from 1972–1974, including alternate versions of works from the group’s earlier records.

The music of Popol Vuh, created under the direction of Florian Fricke, offers a unique combination of electronic and acoustic sounds, drawing from the traditions of sacred music, as well as ambient music and experimental electronics. A striking feature here is the sound of the “choir organ,” an instrument capable of achieving the effect of a human choir, combined with a disturbing and ominous sound. The music accompanies the image, while contributing to the autonomous, spiritual dimension of the film, giving it a mystical, transcendental character.

The Popol Vuh album itself functions as a standalone musical work, extending beyond the context of the film. Its hypnotic, minimalist structure and spiritual tension mark it as one of the key examples of 20th-century ambient music and film music.

Herzog’s film is regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema, winning numerous awards and closely examined by critics and filmmakers. Its minimalist narrative, its vision of madness and the fall of man in confrontation with hostile nature, combined with the one-of-a-kind soundtrack by Popol Vuh, make Aguirre a work that remains current, inspiring both the film community and the music community alike.

To this day, Popol Vuh’s music remains open to fresh analysis and reinterpretation. Alongside the work of Brian Eno it is regarded as a landmark of ambient music, and also as an example of music redefining the role of sound in film and beyond. Contemporary auditions of the album, as in the case of Auxculto, allow us to re-experience its potential anew, both individually and in a communal dimension.

17:00–18:30, Cinema
Screening of films by Mairéad McClean, plus Q&A

A screening of three films by Bath-based Irish artist and filmmaker Mairéad McClean: No More, 2013, 16 min; Making Her Mark, 2018, 11 min; and Acts of Memory, 2024, 28 min, 16mm. 

Set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s turbulent history in the 1970s, No More addresses the subject of internment without trial. While one man enforces imprisonment, elsewhere in Europe another explores freedom through body and breath. No More incorporates footage from a 1972 Jerzy Grotowski Polish Laboratory Theatre training film, showing lead actor Ryszard Cieślak performing body exercises derived from hatha yoga – designed to push the practitioner beyond their own limitations. No More won the inaugural MAC International Ulster Bank Art Prize in 2014.

In Making Her Mark, Scottish dance artist Tess Letham performs a seemingly absurd task: attempting to draw a borderline directly onto the landscape using an oversized pencil. Her physical struggle and the futility of the gesture underscore the often arbitrary nature of boundaries and the limits of control. Filmed across land, sea and air in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Making Her Mark stages the human body in tension with the vastness of nature.

Acts of Memory revisits cinematic and national history through the story of the Public Record Office in Dublin, Ireland – an archive lost to war and its virtual reconstruction a century later. Shot on 16mm film, it imagines exchanges between a member of staff from the Record Office and a researcher. Narrated by an AI-generated voice synthesised from millions of speech recordings, the film reflects on the process of filmmaking while questioning its own role and authority.

19:00– 20:30, Cinema: screening of films by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind

A screening of three films by London-based Palestinian-Danish artist Larissa Sansour and London-based Danish author, director and artist Søren Lind: In Vitro, 2019, 28 min; As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, 2022, 21 min; and Familiar Phantoms, 2023, 42 min.

Commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the 58th Venice Biennale, In Vitro is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film set within an abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem converted into an enormous orchard in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists prepare to replant the soil above.

As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night is a three-channel work featuring an Arabic-language opera on loss, mourning and inherited trauma. A single aria, a new composition by Lebanese composer Anthony Sahyoun, based on Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and the Palestinian traditional song Mashaal, is performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish. 

Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma. Blending live action, special effects, private family photos and archival footage, the film explores the impact of fiction on the creation and reinterpretation of memory. Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Larissa Sansour’s family history and her old childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date.

21:00–22:00, Cinema: live electronic music performance by Teoniki Rożynek with generative visuals by Martyna Chojnacka

An invitation to a rich and adventurous audiovisual journey with electronic music by composer with passion for sound design and sonic waste Teoniki Rożynek and generative visuals by programmer Martyna Chojnacka, a duo that has been working together for many years.

Teoniki Rożynek is a composer with a passion for sound design. Attentive listening to reality provides the key source of her sound material. She collects scraps of sound junk and sonic waste to generate her compositions. Her practice includes electronic and electroacoustic music, both as a solo musician and within collectives. She plays the violin, electronics and randomly found objects. She has also collaborated with artists from other art forms to create films, performances and multimedia installations. Her works have been performed at various festivals, including the Warsaw Autumn, Musica Electronica Nova (Wrocław), Sacrum Profanum (Kraków), Unsound (Kraków), Containerclang (Cologne), and the Bedingo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Victoria, Australia).