On confluence is a body of work around aquatic and amphibious environments through sonic, vibratory and material research. Besides meandering along encounters with worlds never fully known, and holding open spaces for a slippery poetics, the approach is also influenced by anti-extractive and post-migrant frameworks.

AMBIENT TREMOLOGY

Installation at Display Gallery Prague (September 5-29, 2024) in collaboration with Mae Lubetkin and Mižu Mitro.
A short essay on »Ambient Tremology« can be found here

Ambient Tremology reorients the act of listening from the sonic to the vibrant, by gaining contact with trembling matter of amphibious worlds. Echoing the vibroscape of the Danube Delta through sculptural fragments and an audio-tactile composition, the installation attunes to granular memory and ambient force. The works are based in a research residency in the Romanian Danube Delta, where we explored the vibratory linkages of the soaked landscape through an adapted contact-accelerometer.

With gratitude to the people of Sfântu Gheorghe who shared the vibrant Delta region with us during our stay in April/May 2024. Many thanks to the Danube Delta National Research Institute for the guidance about local Delta habitats. Thanks also to Rok Šturm and Juan José López Díez of the Slovenian National Institute of Biology for sharing their knowledge and fieldwork on vibroscapes and ecotremology.

Produced during the 2023-2024 research-based art program 'Bodies of Water' - Inspirační Forum Lab Additional field sessions and residency in the Romanian Danube Delta supported by Culture Moves Europe and hosted by Qolony.eu

SONIC REMNANTS

Part of the intervention 'We?' at Matadero Madrid during the exhibition 'climate fitness'.
The sound based lecture performance that I presented attended hydrological currents and shared pollutants but also the currents of desire that link the site of the Matadero, with its past as a large scale slaughterhouse, to the site of the German meat production company Müller Fleisch. The re-activation of the space was based on recordings of contact microphones that enabled (sonic) access into the production facility of the german company at the riversite of the Enz. The sounds were extracted at the only point of access in the highly securitized slaughterhouse complex, a 30 meter high windowless wall. With the eye and even the bare ears, the building succeeded in obscuring its inner workings from me, but through employing the contact microphones I managed to access a ghostly soundscape consisting of eerie drones and the rhythms of logistic machinery. The only recently constructed building serves as a refrigerated warehouse facility that cools up to 9000 tonnes of meat to -25°C. It is a space devoid of humans, being operated exclusively by machines and state of the art logistic robots, that rearrange the meat on the high shelves. In its fully automated precision this is the metallic cold and razor sharp vision of the Capitalocene slaughterhouse of the 21st century. The lecture text was referencing research of Filippa Ramos that attended the history and construction of the Matadero as a 'modern and efficient' slaughterhouse, inspired by the German slaughterhouse model.

HYDROSONIC FLOOR

the »hydrosonic floor« is based in an ongoing transdisciplinary collaboration with dancer and performer Stella Covi, along the themes of soaked bodies and amphibious zones. The format morphs into different forms depending on the context, and oftentimes takes place near bodies of water.

In its one of its recent versions, »hydrosonic notes on tourism« Stella guides participants through various somatic exercises and a multisensory spa treatment into a moment of collective rest. Kosmas plays ambient textures and field recording and reads morphed notes on the extractive tourism industry and its hallucinatory but tangible effects on identities and landscapes. From southeast asian resorts to the saunas of the Blackforest a slippery Spa moment unfolds – in between rejuvenation and delirium. This is about nothing less than the future of wellnes and not-so-wellness.