alterlife: sonic acts x rupert residency

Sonic Acts and Rupert establish ALTERLIFE, a residency programme focused on collaborative responses to the compounding ecological crisis. We seek an interdisciplinary artist or collective for a two-part research and production residency at Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania (September–October 2024), and with Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (February 2025).

The Project

The climate crisis is a crisis of the imagination, writer Amitav Ghosh warned in The Great Derangement. He states, we are unable to think through the scale and violence of climate change in our culture. The ethics of individualism value personal experiences above structural and collective ones. Yet individual bodies cannot get you out of entanglements, notes Indigenous feminist scholar Michelle Murphy, ‘embodiment does not provide a respite or escape from history, from infrastructures, from relations of power.’

Human bodies do not end at the skin, as Donna Haraway puts it. They expand into the environment, and mirror it back to us. We are living in what Murphy describes as the state of ‘alterlife’, transformed by the chemical entanglements built up in our societies over the centuries of colonial and capitalist exploitation of both humans and non-humans.

Guided by the methodology of critical walking practices, we invite proposals that use imagination to forge alliances and create alternative narratives about our political realities. Wandering is both a political and cultural activity, according to author Rebecca Solnit, ‘an embodied presence in motion connecting us to inner and outer realms.’

How can passing through space critically help us understand and reimagine our environment, our shared histories, and each other, showing us where we can go together? How can we think of alterlife as a starting point for a different approach to life?

What we expect

The project begins with a two-month research residency at Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania from September to October 2024. Next is a one-month residency in the Netherlands in February 2025, followed by the development and production of a new commission for exhibition at Rupert and Sonic Acts in late 2025 and early 2026.