January 8, 2024
Note: to give applicants more time during a busy time of year, the deadline has been extended to January 8, 2024 23:59 CET. We hope that this will encourage the quality of the applications.
Application information here
Submission materials include:
1. Application form, submitted online
2. Minumum 90 second to 7 minute audio sketch of your narrative radio play.
3. A description of the audio sketch explaining what story you would like to tell and how.
We ask, how can we read the river for new perspectives on urgent ecological questions that rivers face globally?
“Pantha Rhei on the Rhine” is an artistic and scientific research project designed to express the latent metaphors and materials carried by the River Rhine. As one of Europe’s largest and most important waterways, the Rhine features massive complexity of enmeshed industrial, cultural, and ecological systems conditioned by international politics, histories, and economics.
The project will commission narrative sound art works about different parts of the River Rhine. They are composed in part with a sound library compiled from the river itself. The sound artworks can be considered as radio plays. They will be played in sequence at the listening sessions to tell a story of the Rhine at each of our partnering institutions the Museum Rehmann in Laufenberg, Switzerland (headwaters of the Rhine), the University of Antwerp Ecosphere’s Mesodrome, a large-scale river simulation facility (the abstracted middle), _V2 Lab for Unstable in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (end of the Rhine into the English Channel and Atlantic Ocean).
“Pantha Rhei on the Rhine” focuses on fostering a techno-poetics that meaningfully links scientific data with poetics drawn from art and art history. Pantha Rhei is Heraclitus’ ancient dictum that “everything flows,” summarizing his famous fragment that “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
The production of the commissioned artworks will be supported with scientific input from University of Antwerp’s Ecosphere group and artistic input from Studio Haseeb Ahmed.
Partnering Institutions:
Studio Haseeb Ahmed has extensive experiences organizing transdisciplinary artistic research projects. While headed by Haseeb Ahmed, the consortium includes a wide network of specialists in fields ranging from genetics, to water treatment, and fluid dynamics. While coordinating this project, Studio Haseeb Ahmed works with methodologies from the hard sciences to produce art installations, symposia, films, essays, and workshops.
V2_ Lab for Unstable Media provides decades of experience pioneering experimental media art production and presentation. They will advise on archiving and public engagement strategies as well as host one of the listening sessions.
Museum Rehmann grows from Swiss sculptor Irwin Rehmann’s estate and elaborates on material approaches to art making. Chief curator Michael Hiltbrunner situates “Pantha Rhei on the Rhine” adjacent to his curatorial focus on future technologies and energy production with three of its own commissioned works.
Our scientific partner is the University of Antwerp’s Ecosphere research group run by Professor Ronny Blust. Our collaboration focuses on the Mesodrome facility, a 1000 m2 aquatic laboratory dedicated to the study complex environmental effects like pollution and global warming have on rivers. The expertise and access to facilities contribute to the transdisciplinary character of this project and instruct the sensing instruments for the “Library of the River” and to the invited artists. Ahmed previous collaborated with Ecosphere to research pharmaceutical pollution in water.
This project is funded by the partners mentioned above and Pro Helvetia Synergies Grant. Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council supports and disseminates Swiss arts and culture. As the Swiss Confederation’s cultural promotion institution, it supports high-quality projects with a focus on diversity. In the field of design, the foundation promotes contemporary Swiss design at all stages of the process, from concept to market. With its initiative Design Switzerland, it aims to help emerging Swiss studios gain visibility, build professional networks and connect with the national and international markets.
River Rhine
The red stars indicate the location of the listening sessions. “Pantha Rhei on the Rhine” brings the scale of the Rhine River, Europe’s third longest, to the scale of the body through a series of artworks. Their dissemination spans the length the length of the river from its headwaters in Switzerland to its exit as the Maas-Rhine Delta in the Netherlands.