Sensorium: Beyond the Sound 2021

Live acts, site-specific VR installations, sonic walks and performances in the public space, compositions for afternoon napping, over-the-phone micro-concerts and deep listening sessions. Acclaimed and debuting artists from the USA, France, Canada, Czech Republic and Slovakia who have performed at Tate Modern and Berghain and who lecture at Harvard. This is Sensorium: Beyond The Sound 2021. The festival takes place in several venues around Bratislava (FUGA, Luna Bar, LOM Space) and partly online. 

The festival’s programme revolves around the theme of ‘refuturing’, coined by writer and scholar Jay Springett. The term reflects on the need to return positive traits to the future despite the fact – or precisely because – reality often suggests the opposite. 

Western thought is suffering from a lack of bold and positive ideas for the future. Anthropologist and Occupy movement founder David Graeber has poignantly called this state the ‘war against the imagination’. 

Faced with present crises, we are swarmed by dark visions of what is to come. But art and the sonic imagination can, besides producing soundtracks to planetary threats, also inspire different ways of thinking. One feels like exclaiming: ‘Before building a better future, we first have to imagine it.’ Sensorium: Beyond The Sound presents new ways of listening to the future.