HOME: The Art of Listening
A Seven-Day International Program
Led by
b e i n g – s o u n d & Giulia Gallina
Culminating in
A Sound Installation & Performance
at the Medieval Castle of Agios Georgios,
Kefalonia Island, Greece
This program is part of the First International Environmental Festival of Kefalonia
Organized by the Ionion Center for the Arts & Culture
Supported by: the OΦΥΠΕΚΑ -Geopark of Kefalonia – Ithaca
& the Hellenic Ministry of Culture
Program Overview:
The ancient Greek term οίκος (oikos) refers to three related but distinct globally applicable concepts:
● the family or the nation,
● the family’s or the nation’s tangible and intangible properties
● the material household resources or the land-state
Οίκος was the basic unit of societies in the pre-industrial era.
The word οίκος is the root of the English prefix eco-, which appears in the words economics and ecology.
If we are to have a future as a species, we need to expand our experience of home from the current economics-based worldview (resources, scarcity, self-interest, and competition) to include an ecological worldview (relationships, abundance, interdependence, and cooperation).
In the program HOME: The Art of Listening, we will use the practice of listening as a way to cultivate the experience of being home: a place of presence and opening up to the beyond-human world.
Each day, the participants will collect sounds through field recordings in various locations, including mountains, gullies, sea and land caves, ancient monuments, etc. Each day will have a theme of inquiry and reflection that will tie into the larger theme of HOME.
The program will culminate in a two-part public presentation:
● A group sound installation (using the field recordings) and
● A performance at the Medieval Castle of Agios Georgios. The installation will consist of sound devices distributed throughout the Castle which will play edited material from the field recordings. The piece will create an immersive and emergent sound environment. The aim is to augment the visitors’ experience and amplify the spirit of the place.
Dates:
Program Dates: Sunday, September 3 – Sunday, September 10
Performance Date at the Castle: Friday, September 8
Artist Preparation at the Center: Friday, August 25 – Saturday, September 2
Who is it for:
Anyone with an interest to connect deeper with themselves and the beyond-human world.
Anyone looking to cultivate their creative practice as a tool for evolution.
Anyone drawn to experience the joys of Kefalonia and Greek culture.
Goals:
For the Island of Kefalonia
● To create a space for cross-cultural exchange.
● To engage the history of the island by activating it with accessible art experiences.
● To enrich the island’s cultural landscape with the Performance at the Castle of Agios Georgios and with the Sound Installation.
● To re-contextualize the everyday sound world of the island by drawing attention to the small, the subtle, and the ignored.
For the visiting participants
● To inspire approaching everyday life through the art of listening.
● To develop skills of awareness through experience and practice.
● To tap into creativity by connecting with inner silence.
● To provide tools for cultivating an expanded sense of being home.
Details:
Organizer: Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture, https://ionionartscenter.gr/
Location: The Greek Island Kefalonia
Deadlines for applications-Early Bird registrations: April 30th 2023
Final Deadlines for applications – registrations May 30th 2023
Language: The program will be conducted in English. All languages are welcome.
Application: web application: http://goo.gl/forms/q2f8aD9uzk
Email application: info@ionionartscenter.gr
Contact & Information (submissions, fees, grants info): info@ionionartscenter.gr
Program Information: contact@ionionartscenter.gr
The Instructors:
b e i n g – s o u n d
b e i n g – s o u n d is a collaborative art and music project between Joro-Boro (DJ, music producer, sound designer, and artist) and Keena Maya (sound artist, instrumentalist, DJ, and architectural designer).
Joro-Boro’s work short-circuits cultural flows, the archaic and the futuristic while diving deep into the nature of art, ritual, and the beyond-human. Joro-Boro was born in Bulgaria and moved to New York where he met his life partner Keena Maya.
Keena Maya creates collective experiences and environments guided by the rhythms of the Earth. Her work lies at the intersection of interspecies collaboration, mutual care, and ceremony. She is rediscovering the ancestral animistic wisdom of her Irish and Norwegian roots.
As b e i n g – s o u n d, they explore space, presence, listening, and relating – to oneself, to others, and to one’s environment.
b e i n g – s o u n d has presented and performed in galleries, museums, public spaces, and festivals across the United States and internationally since 2016. They have received grants from institutions in New York State and the United Kingdom.
b e i n g – s o u n d creates experiential art and sound rituals.
Their experiential art holds an intention of connection, subtlety, and presence. It varies in form: deep listening tea rituals, wordless whispered installations, stories told in the patterns of vibrating water, and chance meetings of strangers in unlikely situations. The aim is to open us up to the wonders and mysteries hidden in everyday life.
Their sound rituals layer a variety of sound sources: live singing bowls and sansulas, reverberating whispered half-melodies, unravelling spirals of organic wooden clicks, the tidal sweep of a granular synthesizer, the geological thump of a sub-sonic sinewave, a dusty loop of a vinyl record player, and hazy recordings of singing whales, crackling ice, and distant train whistles. The result is a world familiar, yet vast and open to the unknown. There are no lines here, no horizon, just a misty sense of luminous presence.
Being as sound and silence, stillness and movement.
Website: being-sound.com
Giulia Gallina
Giulia Gallina, born in Milan, Italy and currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, is a musician, composer, sound artist and linguist who participates in several music projects in Portugal and abroad.
Her education in music starts very early in her childhood and includes piano, violin and singing. When she moves to Lisbon in 2010 she enrolls in the “Academia de Amadores de Música” to take up the piano again and joins the band “The Loafing Heroes”, a cosmopolitan, morphing, dream-folk international collective, whose vision of entanglement, transformation and subversive joy responds to the technological overload and ecological catastrophe of our times. Here she sings, plays the piano, autoharp, keyboard and concertina.
She is also part of a duo called “Storm Factory” with Portuguese musician Rui Maia: a new visionary path is born from the fusion of her neoclassic and minimalist piano compositions with Rui’s experimental and ambient electronics. It is a dialogue between different universes, the search for a dreamy and cinematic soundscape where a sensory piano inspired by sea travels and ancient myths encounters a full set of industrial and unsettling sounds. Aesthetically reframed objects and materials come together as with completing a puzzle, drawn by the noises of cities, factories, people, water, abandoned houses and crushed leaves.
Her solo projects include the creation of a literary-music podcast, called “Zephiro”, containing original music and sound effects, where she talks about travel books and for each episode composes music inspired by the countries and characters appearing in the story. The sound design is specifically forged to accompany the travels to help create a unique listening experience.
Lastly, her most recent performance “Ancient Voices of the Island” was born in Kefalonia, at the “Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture” and has been selected to be part of the “Day of the Mediterranean”, promoted by the Anna Lindh Foundation and the Union for the Mediterranean. The aim of the project has been to record and collect the sounds representing the island of Kefalonia and to embed them in her own minimalist music compositions on piano and autoharp. She creates contemplative soundscapes, involving nature’s elements and ethereal images surrounded by a minimalistic aesthetic.
Website: giuliagallinamusic.com
