Melted for Love at W139

The W139 chapter of the Sonic Acts Biennial exhibition is an acoustic and material study of how ecosystems absorb militarisation, colonial occupation and environmental disruption, tracing signals that travel across land, through the subsurface and within the more-than-human world.

Lower Levant Company (sound artist Emiddio Vasquez and researcher Peter Eramian), with Olga Micińska, merge bat calls, radio recordings from military bases, folk songs and encrypted messages to reflect on the ecological catastrophes of colonial war in the Eastern Mediterranean. Diana Policarpo and architect-researcher Bernardo Gaeiras, in a new commission, speculate on regenerative futures for the former Bugio Lighthouse through radio transmissions of its microscopic inhabitants. Adelita Husni-Bey restages the colonial archives of Italian fascism, exposing damaged water infrastructure and resource extraction in Libya.

Alina Schmuch, resident in the ALTERLIFE programme of Sonic Acts and Rupert (Vilnius), shows a newly commissioned installation on water systems manipulated in times of drought and rising seas. Maeve Brennan descends into a salt mine to question how Western imperial history is written and archived.

Works: Bad luck to every magistrate, and bad luck to every gamekeeper (Olga Micińska, Lower Levant Company); Bugio Eco-Station (Diana Policarpo, Bernardo Gaeiras); Deep Storage (Early Matter) (Maeve Brennan); Like a Flood (Adelita Husni-Bey); Underpasses (Alina Schmuch).