Ecoes - Issue #8 - Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 Reader

In a world marked by crises, conflict, and displacement, we all long for a place to call home. But what happens when these places fail to offer a safe refuge, or when they are no longer within reach, taken from us, or lost to time?

Issue #8 of ECOES magazine – which serves as the reader for Sonic Acts Biennial 2026, Melted for Love – departs from this question, reimagining home not as a physical structure, but as a site of invitation, attentiveness, and care. Unfurling over its pages are the voices of artists, writers, and researchers who shape the Biennial programme, offering depth and orientation, with particular emphasis on the Symposium at the Stedelijk Museum, the multi-gallery exhibition, and the live concerts.

The content includes an examination the psychic and sonorous impacts of contemporary warfare; sound as a tool for political testimony; a gliding through shoals of fish, drumbeats, and the drowned cosmologies of the Middle Passage; an attunement to the damaged ecosystems of the Tagus River; archival recordings of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra; an introduction into the Acousmonium Handbook.

Also: a presentation of folk customs – from carnivals to pagan rites – as living, contested traditions; the enduring scars of British colonial rule in Ireland; curatorial essays who guide readers through the Biennial exhibition; a tracing of airwaves across time and empire through the murky history of the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station; mangrove intelligence and coastal resilience. And more!

FEATURING
Angeliki Tzortzakaki, Anton Kats, Arie Altena, Ayesha Hameed, Chiara Cartuccia, Dominika Mikołajczyk, Dylan Kerr, Eleni Ikoniadou, Fabienne Rachmadiev, Flavia Dzodan, François J. Bonnet, Franek Dziduch, Guillermo Canek García, Hannah Pezzack, HUNITI GOLDOX, Jeremy Deller, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Leslie García, Lower Levant Company, Margarida Mendes, Maud Seuntjens, Sam Dunscombe, Sondi, Steve Goodman, Tiiu Meiner