Adnan Softić at the RIXC residency, 2025.
Adnan Softić has been selected for the RIXC Immersive Art and Nature Residency Program 2025 in collaboration with Goethe Institut in Riga. This residency takes place with the support of the Goethe-Institut Riga, the Franco-German Cultural Fund and the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia in collaboration with the Resonances of Nature project and the French Institute in Latvia.
Adnan Softić (Germany) is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin and Sarajevo. His interdisciplinary practice explores themes such as exile, invisibility, and the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ecology. In recent years, he has collaborated with Nina Softić on research-based projects shown at venues including Ars Electronica Linz, Budapest Galéria, n.b.k. Berlin, Whitechapel Gallery (London), NiMAC Nicosia, and many more. Their project klimatom_ARCTIC≈2020 received a Special Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2023.
https://softic.info/
Adnan Softić, Nina Softić. Klimaton, 2023.
In the RIXC residency, which takes place in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in Riga, artist Adnan Softič will create a new sound composition and collaboration with Latvian artists, resulting in a performance that will take place in the RIXC Art and Science Festival 2025 symposium.
In the performance “Klimaton”, the Arctic landscape appears as an autonomous voice that can be addressed and played back by the climate data instrument KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020. In a performance with Latvian sound artists from Riga and Liepaja, who will create a unique symbiosis of sound, words and visual art, the artist will address climate change and today’s pressing ecological issues.
The sound object KLIMATON ARCTIC≈ 2020 is based on a seminal event in scientific research: At the end of 2020, the research expedition MOSAiC (Alfred Wegener Institute) returned from its Arctic voyage, having spent more than a year collecting data with a kilometre-long network of measuring stations. It is the largest scientific data collection from the region ever and possibly also one of the last large-scale recording of a disappearing landscape that is considered by scientists to be “the key witness of climate change”.
Adnan Softić together with Nina Softić and a group of MOSAiC scientists, the composer Thies Mynther and a technical team, developed a sound instrument that outputs the data from the Arctic as sound – creating a large scale sonified portrait of a disappearing landscape. The instrument is a hybrid between a sonification device and a music instrument – allowing an open approach to the data.
The data of different categories of landscape are played using human voices as the keynote, modulating them and creating a strange choral voice. The earth assimilates the human voice and makes it “speak the language of the earth” – a “geological turn”, a reversed network of relationships in which the landscape is playing the human and not the other way round.
Supported by the Goethe-Institut Riga, Franco-German Cultural Fund, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.
Partner: French Institute in Latvia, within the framework of the Resonanses of Nature project.
