“Saturating Memory: Between Sound, Migration, and Audiovisual Intimacy”:

artist talk with Nour Sokhon, who is performing the same day of the festival, led by music journalist Ula Nowak.



This artist talk will explore sound and image as tools for navigating memory, migration, and emotional saturation. Through Nour Sokhon’s research-based practice, the conversation will unfold around listening as a political and intimate act, and audiovisual immersion as a strategy of resistance and care. Together, we will reflect on how contemporary sound art can shape empathy, presence, and new forms of collective awareness, referring also to the latest interview:



https://ulanowak.substack.com/p/sonic-memory-capsule and more.

Festival opening music ritual for percussion instruments by Hubert Zemler and Bartosz Szablowski.

Refreshing drinks, %, coffee, sweets and space to chill next to the AMFITEATR STAGE.

DJ set by Rabih Beaini prepared especially for the pool space.

Beirut Birds (طيور بيروت) - a project of Nour Sokhon- is a sonic memory capsule honoring (inter)personal stories of migration, displacement, and the cyclical turbulent circumstances in Lebanon. Transforming her multi-year project, multidisciplinary artist and composer Nour Sokhon crystallizes the performance Beirut Birds (طيور بيروت) into her long-awaited debut album. When presented and performed live, it is accompanied by juxtaposed images of the Lebanese capital’s city life and avian migration across the Mediterranean Sea, representing themes strongly woven into the music.

In her variegated artistic process, Nour has undertaken and recorded interviews with diasporas and repatriates to commemorate, share, heal, and envision. These source materials become the album’s core elements that loop, narrate, and return throughout time, with Nour responding with both instruments and her voice. Chanting in dialogue with the interviewees, crafting near-mantras, Nour further congregates these materially-rooted soundscapes by including field recordings that she gleaned during 2018–2021 in Lebanon and her subsequent move to Berlin.

Embedded within the composition are manipulated sounds from objects that symbolize migration, such as office bells, a luggage wheel, car parts, and bureaucratic paperwork. Musically, the songs are enriched by Nour’s improvisations on classical piano, electronics, synthesizers, violin, and various percussion instruments. As time is sculpted and the layers blur, words become specters, while an entropic orchestra of drums and melody rises, giving shape to an in-between space for those who have left, and stayed.



https://auralconduct.bandcamp.com/album/beirut-birds

Eivind Vullum following Ida Messel's words "...The slow, spare chord loop makes every frequency very distinct- almost visible- with the music taking on a new meaning each time it loops round. It’s rather like trying to repeat a single word again and again, and finding the word takes on a grotesque, comic form with its context completely transformed." at SAUNA FESTIVAL will perform two of his live electronic pieces coming from a new solo material: an electro-acoustic work for paper, electric signal and speech and a piece based around guitar, electronics and video.

Following her 2021 EP Only (ENXPL), Berlin-based composer and sound artist Bridget Ferrill presents a new body of work for Subtext recordings that foregrounds the harp while weaving together a constellation of contributions from instrumentalists, creating a record that is simultaneously enchanting and confrontational, soothing and antagonistic. Domschatzkammer draws from the aesthetics of minimalist classical music and Celtic folk music while animating them with an anarchical punk spirit.

Deeply personal at its core, the record reflects an emotional journey of yearning, rupture, and lesbian love. It is also grounded in Ferrill’s broader practice: her training in experimental music and new instrument design, her work as a sound engineer and synth builder, and her enduring influences, from Pauline Oliveros to Moondog to Donnacha Dennehy.

safe landscapes of buried memories



[ 3-channel video installation; 5’00”, loop; 2025 ] [ video, concept: Katarzyna Debska / music: Jerzy Mączyński ]



The project safe landscapes of buried memories approaches the natural environment as a political body- one subjected to processes of erasure, and gradual disappearance. Through dark, reduced, soft or barely legible images, the landscape appears as a vulnerable archive of loss, existing at the threshold of visibility. The fading forms evoke a body marked by slow violence: environmental degradation that unfolds quietly, without spectacle, until only traces remain. Analogue photography-based videos here becomes both a tool and a limitation- attempting to bear witness while acknowledging its inability to fully restore what has been lost. By presenting nature as a ghostly presence rather than a stable image, the project questions which bodies are granted visibility, care, and political agency. Installed as large-format, near life-scale prints within an urban interior, the work creates a bodily encounter between viewer and landscape, emphasizing proximity, fragility, and shared vulnerability in a time of ecological crisis. The research forming this work is part of a longer artistic process developed by Katarzyna Dębska, unfolding through a series of earlier, smaller-scale photographic attempts and visual studies based on video and 3d environments. These initial works focused on observing the condition of the natural environment and exploring non-anthropocentric perspectives, nature’s adaptation skills in human-altered spaces and on capturtig plants in unexpcted unnatural infrastructures.The current project constitutes a final and condensed development of this research, in which previous questions are not expanded further but instead brought to a point of reduction, silence, and disappearance- at this stage, the work turns away from representation toward what remains barely perceptible.

"For SAUNA’s unique pool space, I’ll be collating a series of field recordings and reworks of existing ‘ambient’ sounds inspired by bodies of water and loosely channeling the tragic myth of Undine, the water spirit. The compositions will reference the story of the godly in the world of the human, a great curse, and betrayal for a site-specific soundscape."- Flora Yin Wong



The paintings series presented at the festival emerged from an nterest in corporeality understood as a transient experience, dicult to grasp unequivocally. The starting point was intense red tones and fragmentary, blurred forms, in which the body is not depicted directly but appears as a trace, an afterimage, or a spectral presence. The closeness of the frame and the restriction of formal means cause the painting to function more as a surface than as a representation – a site of pressure, tension, or collapse. Blurring and soft tonal transitions don’t conceal the form; instead, they suspend it between recognition and loss, preventing a clear or xed attribution of meaning. The series does not construct a narrative or sequence, but operates through repetition and variation, allowing the paintings to function as autonomous yet interconnected elds of intensity. Corporeality remains present, but elusive – reduced to sensation, tension, and the viewer’s physical response.

Note from the artist: Make Ambient Sexy Again

"Meditation for Scattered Minds" is an audiovisual set exploring the theme of balancing focus and distraction. Ambient sounds, experimental compositions, ecstatic club music, and pulsating mantras will guide us through various states, dynamics, and emotions. Many of these tracks draw inspiration from ritual and folk music (from Indonesia, Uganda, Japan, and Tibet, among others). The visuals, like the sound, will reflect this process through reactivity and intensification, combining found footage, 3D scans, and generative imagery.

Coffee, refreshing drinks, sweets and space to chill next to the AMFITEATR STAGE.

Videos screening including video works by Hanna Abrahamsson, Myriam Rey, Weronika Wysocka, Amy Muhoro, Mo Tan, Gosia Trajkowska, Agata Lech, Kat Zavada, Nasia Papavasioliou, Mila Nowacka.



During the event our refreshment zone will be opened so you'll be able to have a seat, get a coffee or other refreshing drinks, sweet bites and relax!



SCREENING PROGRAMME:



"You’re finally home", Hanna Abrahamsson

"Insomnia", Mo Tan

"...and codes that break my heart. Anyway.", Amy N. Muhoro & Weronika Wysocka

"Only My Voice", Myriam Rey

"Feedback", Mila Nowacka

"A Year Without Summer", Gosia Trajkowska & Agata Lech

"SOVRA", Kat Zavada

bios and Laura will present their new audiovisual set.

Discussion "Music in film, film in music- bridges, challenges, flows between arts" led by film journalist Łukasz Mańkowski with guests: Patrycja Bukowska, Weronika Adamowska and Maria Zbąska.