ECOES #5 by Sonic Acts

Water flows through the fifth edition of Ecoes magazine, weighed down by ‘toxic muck’, rain and crystals of ice, or light as bubbles and the hairs on coral larvae. Including contributions from nineteen artists, researchers and writers, this new body of texts is the result of meandering investigations and artistic experimentation.

To celebrate the launch of the latest issue, Alice Johnston Rougeaux will present her writing on The Cloud Bar, a coastal Lincolnshire vantage point for watching clouds on the edge of the North Sea. Using this locale as a starting point for tracing Western gazes towards the sky – from Luke Howard’s cloud classification system coinciding with the Industrial Revolution and Imperial expansion, to crowd-sourced photography stored in data centres – her work explores the formless and erratic rhythmics of things that drift.

After a short break, artist-researcher Annika Kappner will continue the evening with a live incarnation of her visual essay, ‘AKWĀ’. Creating a sensory scenography through a blended use of soundscape and poetic narration, Kappner’s piece invites participants to investigate their own intimacy with bodies of water.

Both presentations will be followed by a Q&A session led by Ecoes contributor and assistant editor Hannah Pezzack, touching upon each contributor’s creative practice, ecological wanderings and ongoing research.

Over the past decade, Sonic Acts’ ongoing interest and concern has been the climate emergency and the role and importance of art in the crisis. Expanding beyond the festival, a bi-annual art magazine, Ecoes unpacks alternatives to the anthropocentric perspective that approaches the nonhuman as a resource. A portmanteau of ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, this magazine about ‘art in the age of pollution’ showcases compelling artistic and critical perspectives that engage with the past, future or afterlives of environmental harm, toxicity, extraction, and waste.