Sounds of Skies, Forests of Instability

A two-week satellite exhibition of the Sonic Acts Biennial at Het Documentaire Paviljoen (IDFA), bringing together two newly commissioned immersive installations: the northern skies of the aurora borealis and a simulated forest that keeps mutating.

Femke Herregraven, winner of the Theodora Niemeijer Prize 2025, presents The Evacuated, a Dutch forest that rewrites itself in real time, inspired by a site that holds a living field genebank. Memory becomes volatile, time loops and mutates, and the forest stays in flux, both at risk and a place of risk.

Sébastien Robert presents All But Silent, an experimental film and installation on the sound of the northern lights, moving between field research, scientific measurement and Indigenous cosmologies to show how non-human forces and human meaning-making remain entangled, and how listening can become a way of approaching the unknown.