Climate | Sound | Action 2
Media Lab, Belfast, BT7 1PA
Friday 17th April 2026
For the Climate | Sound | Action series co-produced by Sonorities Festival Belfast and Reach’26 Arts and Sustainability Festival, we have programmed works that explore or respond to environmental challenges, align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or propose new, sustainable approaches to artistic practice.
This event will feature four pieces:
Sarah Angliss -Schlieren Music: The Threads of the Air
In this audio-visual performance, air becomes far more than negative space. Schlieren imaging and high-speed video enable you see the eddies and currents of the air around the performers. Sarah Angliss’ score sonifies these air movements and radically stretches the voice of singer Melanie Pappenheim, revealing inner details of her vocalisations and breath. As the musicians play, VJ Coco Das collides Schlieren images with coral-like SEM photos of the lungs and fragmented images of the city.
Abi Prián and Miki Corfiel – A tree’s memories
Composition and experimentation relates with territory and how it intersects with our identities and belonging. Thinking about all that happens nowadays in a capitalist and increasingly individualistic society, gentrification comes to our mind and how this affects the life quality of people from a territory. In Spain and Argentina, as it is happening in a lot of areas, hectares from national preserved parks get burned on purpose or they are sold to an entrepreneur to build new hotels for more tourists to come.How does this affect our daily lives? Where does the memory of all those burned spaces and trees remain once they are gone?
Gordon Delap – Ora Obscura
I started out here by capturing some fairly innocuous frames of plants and water and testing whether I could inject some instability. I initially thought of this composition as an exploration of the energy, restlessness, and even violence that can underly the surface tranquillity of nature. I wondered whether the attractive—though rather anodyne—images could be reframed as a kind of barrage of sound and image.
As the work progressed, I became additionally concerned with perspectives in documenting nature: the intrusion of poking cameras in places where they are unwanted, the unreliability in narration and lack of authenticity in the audio artifact, the way that the camera bounds its subjects of interest to the exclusion of the wider context.
Hantao Li and Juice Shuting Cui – Natura 2040
‘Natura 2040’ draws its inspiration from Edward O. Wilson’s provocative Half-Earth theory, which reserving half of the planet as nature reserves to address the crises of ecological degradation and species extinction. The project envisions an alternative reality where the fictional organization Natura 2040 has compressed sprawling farmland into two 100-meter high walls that demarcate the boundaries between city and nature in the artificially constructed land of Flevopolder, Netherlands. This bold move leaves half of the polder to rewild, becoming an extension of the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve.What does it mean to preserve nature on artificially constructed land?
This event will feature four pieces:
Sarah Angliss -Schlieren Music: The Threads of the Air
In this audio-visual performance, air becomes far more than negative space. Schlieren imaging and high-speed video enable you see the eddies and currents of the air around the performers. Sarah Angliss’ score sonifies these air movements and radically stretches the voice of singer Melanie Pappenheim, revealing inner details of her vocalisations and breath. As the musicians play, VJ Coco Das collides Schlieren images with coral-like SEM photos of the lungs and fragmented images of the city.
Abi Prián and Miki Corfiel – A tree’s memories
Composition and experimentation relates with territory and how it intersects with our identities and belonging. Thinking about all that happens nowadays in a capitalist and increasingly individualistic society, gentrification comes to our mind and how this affects the life quality of people from a territory. In Spain and Argentina, as it is happening in a lot of areas, hectares from national preserved parks get burned on purpose or they are sold to an entrepreneur to build new hotels for more tourists to come.How does this affect our daily lives? Where does the memory of all those burned spaces and trees remain once they are gone?
Gordon Delap – Ora Obscura
I started out here by capturing some fairly innocuous frames of plants and water and testing whether I could inject some instability. I initially thought of this composition as an exploration of the energy, restlessness, and even violence that can underly the surface tranquillity of nature. I wondered whether the attractive—though rather anodyne—images could be reframed as a kind of barrage of sound and image.
As the work progressed, I became additionally concerned with perspectives in documenting nature: the intrusion of poking cameras in places where they are unwanted, the unreliability in narration and lack of authenticity in the audio artifact, the way that the camera bounds its subjects of interest to the exclusion of the wider context.
Hantao Li and Juice Shuting Cui – Natura 2040
‘Natura 2040’ draws its inspiration from Edward O. Wilson’s provocative Half-Earth theory, which reserving half of the planet as nature reserves to address the crises of ecological degradation and species extinction. The project envisions an alternative reality where the fictional organization Natura 2040 has compressed sprawling farmland into two 100-meter high walls that demarcate the boundaries between city and nature in the artificially constructed land of Flevopolder, Netherlands. This bold move leaves half of the polder to rewild, becoming an extension of the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve.What does it mean to preserve nature on artificially constructed land?
