Open Call
For Artists, Researchers and beyond
Laboratory, Stadt Wehlen, Germany
August 11 – September 8 2025
This year’s theme of the laboratory is “Sonic Confession”
Laboratory will take place 11.8.–8.9.2025 in Gallery Torhaus, Stadt Wehlen with the following public open presentations in Torhaus Wehlen Gallery and the surrounding environment of Stadt Wehlen, C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts in Dresden, and at Ernst-Reuter-Platz in Berlin.
We are continuing into the second year of
“Sonic Confession“, deepening our exploration of collective creation through a self-directed annual art and research lab at the Torhaus Wehlen Gallery in Germany’s Saxon Switzerland National Park area. Building on last year’s inquiries, we will further shape and experiment with existing and emerging approaches, practices, and the intersections between local culture, nature and evolving technologies. With a continued emphasis on Correlated Complementarity, this year’s lab maintains its focus on sensory perception and the ability to hear, an encounter of listening practices.
While sound remains central, we do not intend to exclude other forms of perception, instead encouraging a broader dialogue on how different modes of experience interact and inform one another.
Our intention is to incorporate inner and outer relations into our laboratory, meaning, within our own group and connect it to the multiplicity of the cultural environment in which we settle.
Moreover, one of the aspects of the laboratory is the emphasis on the actual act of exchange and learning together about the field of Acoustic Ecology.
Through ecomusicology we explore the relationships between sound and the natural environment. By doing and experiencing one forms a memory, encoded within the body. Weaving together different angles and practices of field recording, listening, and music/sound making, we encounter a philosophical question: what is music and what is sound and where is a border between. Can we bring together traditions of herbalism, folklore and new thought processes and disembodied entities and technology?
For this years edition, we are inviting enthusiasts to take part in exploration of possibilities of ways of communication, beyond sound based entities and spaces. Everyone with whom such streams resonate, and who is interested.
Concept of laboratory, structure, place
Within the nonhierarchical structure of collective-organization we aim to create a space where one_us can share, learn and exchange beyond the old hierarchical modes, spectrally and in multiple layers of existence and psyché. In the place of residency, we practice collective cooking, shared activities in exchange based knowledge set ups, and regular channeling circles, where we update on each process, mood, upcoming ideas, realizations. Part of the laboratory is a one day–one night public event where we share outcomes and work in progress from the laboratory.
In this year, there will be the following workshops and lectures, in which participants of the laboratory can take part.
- Field recording and listening practice
- Sound cartography
- Hydrophones and underwater sound perception
- Silent day
- Somatic practice, body work
- History and field exploration
- Becoming alpaca workshop
- Stone licking workshop (on connectivity of geographical belonging)
and more.
To enter the call:
> Pick 3 questions and reply to them in any way, form, medium you feel to.
> Please generate 3 questions to us in written English.
By doing so, you agree that your questions will be documented and published on our website, as the initial contact space for the “feedback loops” between other applicants, the collective, and wider viewers, you can choose to publish your questions anonymously. These questions will contribute to the on-going open-(re)source of our exploration and
experimentation during and after this year’s laboratory.
> Select 1-3 of your works that respond to our thematic direction that you
wish to share with us in any formats– pdf, jpeg, video link, audio link, webpage.
> Personal website or portfolio that presents your previous experiences.
> Please put the required information in one PDF file and send to:
With this open call we will like to invite:
– 5 laboratory participants for the duration of 29 days, from 11th of August to 8th of September 2025
Selection Process
Our selection process comes out from questions which oiioiooi shares as a part of opencall, inviting applicants to pick and answer specific number of questions they choose upon their taste. The Q&A always first consists of reading and selecting the answers from questions. This is done anonymously, where the identity of all applicants is non and equal, and oiioiooi members don’t know who is who. This we find a very crucial approach, which creates the place without hierarchy and with no “personal interest” engagement. In the 2nd stage we uncover the names which were behind the shared answers, taking a look at sent portfolios. In the 3rd stage we invite a shortlist of applicants for an online interview. When the final selection is made we send an email letter to all who applied, sharing the results.
Deadline for Application: 14.6.
Announcement of the results: 28.6.
You can find all information you need also in this PDF
Location:
Torhaus Wehlen Gallery, at Stadt Wehlen, Germany, and its surrounding nature of
Saxon Switzerland
Important dates:
11.8.–8.9.2025 The Year of Acknowledging Sound Laboratory
End of August
Public one day–one night site–specific event (sharing and presenting
outcomes from laboratory) at Stadt Wehlen, Germany (various locations including Torhaus Wehlen Gallery, urban and National Park surroundings).
September 2025
2nd public event at C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts in Dresden.
End of September
3rd public event the Urban Memory Joints at Ernst-Reuter-Platz, Berlin.
What do we offer:
As a private initiative, the financing of this artist residency programme is dependent
on the support of public institutions. For this reason, we have submitted
applications for financial support, the results we expect in June 2025.
With a positive funding decision, we intend to offer the following conditions:
– A travel cost share (limited to bus or train)
– A possible mini grant (depending on the grant results)
– Vegan/Vegetarian food
– Shared sleeping spaces, with shower, kitchen, and working studios, basic
construction tools
* How do you digest various sounds? Where do they go through? Within or around you?
* How do you feel the sounds?
* If plants hold the memory of fire, do they also hold the memory of rain?
* Do your dreams contain sound?
* How would you cook a sonic dish of liberation for multi-species parenting?
*Where does the practice of sonic confession starts ?
* Here now, hear by
The ultrasonic beasts telecom bus?
* What role does water play in carrying memories within an ecosystem?
* How can sound, touch, and other sensory experiences deepen our relationship with landscape?
*When do you stop listening? What is your re_set modus ?
* Does the landscape grieve, and if so, how does it express its sorrows?
*Would you ferment deep listening practices? describe the inside of that jar if you feel like connecting to our kitchen lab practices (we use to bury kimchi to listen to the roots and soil, of the temperature of the forest close to old dark moist caves)
*If you would be antennas and frequencies, prolonged, amplified human being, describe your sonar touch. Could you make up a simulation of what it would sound like to listen through you as exoskeleton or device of your own kind ?
*What makes you shiver in pleasure while inhabiting a soundscape?
*Have you an idea of what it may sound like to grind stones against each other collectively and why we would do that ?
*How do you breathe?
*What is your first dream you remember?
*What rides the wind of a grandmother’s laugh, hides in a soup recipe whispered to a dog, and waits patiently in the silence after a forgotten song—what still lives in oral history?
*Did you ever licked a stone, tasted the ground ? what memories does that reminds you ?
* Can in between spaces be durational ?
*Witch the which way?
*When did you first realize that THIS was (your) topic?
*Sometimes, I find myself listening and humming along with the refrigerator in the supermarket. And you—what do you like to do in public space?
*What importance do you attach to care and the practices around it? If you do not consider that you give any time or attention to these expertise, who do you *identify with these practices?
*Who is listening and what are they transcribing?
*What song does the fish sing when it has run out of battery?
*Because the water is so muddy you can’t see and the stream too strong. Would you like to explore the river with a rope ? Or anything else to hold you?
*When someone next to you is dreaming very loud, does your grandma would paralyse them speaking spells with her tongue? Do you remember any of her words ?
What truth lies in the sick body?
* What sound is in your head right now? Is it a hallucination, an imagination, a memory, a call, or a formation for the (e)motion?
*How do you keep a balcony between sense and nonsense?
*Can you steal the dream?
*What is the difference between collective dreaming and collective screaming?
*Fog, bell follows the cave of hollow?
*How does it move?
*How do you listen?
*Water ear, hairy cochlea?
*How do you breathe?
*What is your first dream you remember?
*What rides the wind of a grandmother’s laugh, hides in a soup recipe whispered to a dog, and waits patiently in the silence after a forgotten song—what still lives in oral history?
*Are you going through any transformational process ? Please specify.
*Is it possible to find two things which are completely unrelated to each other?
* What would it feel like in y/our body to be omnipresent?
*Would you want to get rid of self-consciousness if you could?
*How do you best nourish many, and maybe contradicting, parts of yourself(selves)?
*Do you believe in technology as a life-form?
*How to get into resonance with the world?
*How do you travel with gravity?
* When was the last time you talked with non-human? what did you learn?
*Are your inner home and outer home in the same place? If not, how does your home”s” meet each other?
*Do You believe that our ancestors had a special relationship with spiritual world through Nature?
*Do you have to answer the question to get out of this dream ?
*What type of movement transforms the notion of territory?where is this territory ends and where its start?
*How can we open our sensitivity and perception to a multi-species interconnectedness?
*How do you create belonging? What are you in belonging with? How do you consider a walk different from a hike?
*Posture, pose or position – what do they align with?
*To what extent do extremities reach?
*Between post-human & human, how do you move through irreversibility?
*What slice of speech sounds feel most tasty on your tongue?
*Maps located the call for the final event, imagine the altar and church organ and crowd, timewise which dimension is opening ?