What will you do
The workshop unfolds through four interconnected cases that explore conditions of silence across microbial, embodied, toxicological, and infrastructural scales. Throughout the day, participants will move through transscalar modes of listening. Beginning with a single drop of water, participants explore how microorganisms challenge listening itself. Unable to hear them directly, they experiment with observation, traces, and indirect sensing as forms of microbial listening. Over sensing the frequencies of bubbles with the whole body, approaching toxicity as a metabolic listening score, and following a sound file through kilometres of submarine cables crossing the ocean floor. Together, these exercises invite participants to reflect on how questions of rights, memory, territory, voice, and evidence shift across these scales, and how oceans connect them through their sonic and material layers.
The workshop concludes with a collective recording and listening session where participants share their sonic traces, narrative scores, and sensory encounters. These contributions form the basis of a collaborative, multimodal, diffractive counter-cartography that develops into a digital radio platform.
The project Diffractive Ensembles: Silence as a Thread for Listening was incubated within TBA21–Academy's OCEAN / UNI Sound Ecologies, and supported by Ars Biologica (Budweis 2028, CZ). Guided by Raquel Ledo Doval, Denisa Půbalová, Pablo Torres Gómez, and Nina Blume.
Raquel Ledo Dova
Raquel Ledo Doval is a molecular biologist working at the intersection of marine microbiology, ecology, and sustainability. Her work explores the invisible worlds of aquatic microorganisms as both scientific systems and narrative spaces, where ecological processes, extractivism, and transformation intersect. Moving between research and art–science practices, she is interested in making these hidden dynamics perceptible, connecting scientific knowledge with cultural narratives, and rethinking relationships between humans and oceanic environments.
Denisa Půbalová (sikau/půbalová)
Denisa Půbalová (she/her, CZ/NL) is an artist, researcher and creative coder whose process-based research develops multisensory methods of attunement to socio-ecological incommensurabilities, including human-fungi-technology systems, diatom climate archives, and gut-soil microbiomes, inviting bodily, material and more-than-human forms of knowing. She co-authored the research publication Planeta Kampus (2025, Arbor Vitae). She practices collaboratively – with Dr. Lea Luka Sikau as sikau/půbalová and with scientists, ecologists, doctors, and geologists, multiplying incommensurabilities across disciplines. We exhibit processes as organs (stuff change), carousels and cocoons (turning green), interventions (after swallowing), membranes (as we synch), smells (reality is initially volatile), and dinners (what does your gut rehearse to tell you?). sikau/půbalová have been commissioned by Ars Electronica, LABoral, Science Gallery, Kunsthalle Prague, and S+T+ARTS. Currently, they’re residents at Mediamatic and gnration (EMAP).
Pablo Torres Gómez
Pablo Torres Gómez is a researcher, sound artist, and anthropologist whose practice follows aqueous drifts, attending to vibratory modes through which earthbound relations emerge. With(in) these modes, Pablo unsettles inherited figures of silence in contexts of planetary extractivism, engaging vibratile agencies as threads for moistening planetary sensibility beyond landscape imaginaries of separability and permanence. Torres Gómez is a PhD candidate in Art in Practice at the HfbK Hamburg, associate director of the Listening Biennial, and his work has been activated at documenta15, LABVERDE, Ars Electronica, TBA21’s Ocean Archive, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, among others.
Nina Blume
Nina Blume is an Amsterdam-based spatial researcher, sound artist, and curator. Her practice and discourse center on infrastructure spaces and sites of resource extraction as contested grounds focused on histories of extraction, sovereignty, and climate politics. Grounded in fieldwork and archival research, her work mobilizes sound and image as material evidence and a relational method between space, acoustics, aesthetics, and politics. Alongside her individual work, she develops workshops and platforms around resource politics and sound as a method for conducting fieldwork. Nina graduated from the Sandberg Instituut’s MA Studio for Immediate Spaces, and her work has been part of TBA21, Rewire, WORM, and wysiwyg, among others.
Information
3rd of September
10:30 - 15:00, with breaks
Location: Panorama Studio (2nd floor), Mediamatic
The event has a capacity of maximum 12 people. Registration will be possible in advance or on the day itself via the ticket link.
Please note that this workshop will be held in English.
For questions, please send an email to workshop@mediamatic.nl.
Read our ticket terms and conditions here.