Preemptive Listening

Aura Satz / United Kingdom & Finland / 2024 / World Premiere / 89 min

A seemingly simple and familiar object becomes the subject of a sprawling but well-orchestrated reflection on living in a time of crisis and overlapping disasters. The object is the sirens you never notice until they suddenly go off, signalling an emergency. Sirens are civilisation’s formal indicator of an acute loss of control. Artist Aura Satz’s current research into sirens finds its definitive form in this simultaneously concrete and abstract meditation on crises, disasters and the (aural) signs they inscribe in the world. The work’s soundtrack is produced in collaboration with over 20 musicians, all rethinking the siren. At a time when modern thinking and science are unable to provide adequate solutions to ongoing and escalating emergencies, the siren is seen as a prism of possibility for the emergence of new ways of perceiving and responding.