Sound Ecologies: Diffractive Ensembles for Oceanic Listening

OCEAN / UNI Spring 2026 Activations

Diffractive Ensembles for Oceanic Listening by Raquel Ledo DovalDenisa Půbalová, Pablo Torres Gómez, and Nina Blume is a multisite artistic research process and live radio experiment that listens with the ocean's turbulent heterogeneity. It unfolds across four situated locations—Amsterdam, the North Sea, the Wadden Sea, and the Pacific coast of Colombia—each anchored in a specific oceanic relation, from data infrastructures and microbial sensing to ancestral maritime territoriality and toxic contamination. A decentralized live broadcast will bring these sites into contact through diffraction and reverse forensics: listening backward from acoustic traces toward the relations and material conditions that make them audible.

 

The project has been selected as a part of the OCEAN / UNI Spring 2026 Activation series by the program jury, who recognized both the conceptual rigor and the already-functioning methodology the group demonstrated. They noted the genuine dialogue between sound and non-sound practices across the team, and the project's potential to grow into an open sound archive addressing slow environmental violence and the sonic dimensions of the hydrosphere—a natural continuation within the ocean comm/uni/ty and Ars Biologica frameworks.

 

JURY

Robertina Šebjanič, artistic lead, independent

Petra Linhartová, director of digital program, TBA21

Markéta Dolejšová, researcher and curator, Ars Biologica

Pedro Manuel Sobral Pombo, researcher and scholar, MEDiverSEAty

Michal Kučerák, researcher and curator, TBA21 and Ars Biologica

Fiona Middleton, researcher and community lead, TBA21

Ludovica Montecchio, research and doctoral candidate, TBA21 and MEDiverSEAty

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nina Blume is an Amsterdam-based spatial researcher, sound artist, and curator. Her practice and discourse center on infrastructure spaces and sites of resource extraction as contested grounds focused on histories of extraction, sovereignty, and climate politics. Grounded in fieldwork and archival research, her work mobilizes sound and image as material evidence and a relational method between space, acoustics, aesthetics, and politics. Her practice combines on-site recording and sampling to translate spatial conditions into sonic forms and archives. Alongside her individual work, she develops workshops and platforms around resource politics and sound as a method for conducting fieldwork. Nina graduated from the Sandberg Instituut’s MA Studio for Immediate Spaces and participated in TBA21–Academy’s Organismo program in the case study Non-Archives. Her sound work has been shown at the Rewire Context program since 2024.

 

Raquel Ledo Doval is a molecular biologist working at the intersection of marine microbiology, ecology, and sustainability. Her work explores the invisible worlds of aquatic microorganisms as both scientific systems and narrative spaces, where ecological processes, extractivism, and transformation intersect. Moving between research and art–science practices, she is interested in making these hidden dynamics perceptible, connecting scientific knowledge with cultural narratives, and rethinking relationships between humans and oceanic environments. 

 

Denisa Půbalová (she/her, CZ/NL) is an artist, researcher and creative coder whose process-based research develops multisensory methods of attunement to socio-ecological incommensurabilities, including human-fungi-technology systems, diatom climate archives, and gut-soil microbiomes, inviting bodily, material and more-than-human forms of knowing. She co-authored the research publication Planeta Kampus (2025, Arbor Vitae). She practices collaboratively – with Dr. Lea Luka Sikau as sikau/půbalová and with scientists, ecologists, doctors, and geologists, multiplying incommensurabilities across disciplines. We exhibit processes as organs (stuff change), carousels and cocoons (turning green), interventions (after swallowing), membranes (as we synch), smells (reality is initially volatile), and dinners (what does your gut rehearse to tell you?). sikau/půbalová have been commissioned by Ars Electronica, LABoral, Science Gallery, Kunsthalle Prague, and S+T+ARTS. Currently, they’re residents at Mediamatic and gnration (EMAP).

 

Pablo Torres Gómez is a researcher, sound artist, and anthropologist. His practice follows aqueous drifts, attending to vibratory modes through which earthbound relations emerge. With(in) these modes, Pablo unsettles inherited figures of silence in contexts of planetary extractivism, engaging vibratile agencies as threads for moistening planetary sensibility beyond landscape imaginaries of separability and permanence. Torres Gómez is a PhD candidate in Artistic Practice at the HfbK Hamburg, associate director of the Listening Biennial and part of the collective ~pes: laboratory for animal dreams. His work has been activated at documenta fifteen, Ars Electronica, TBA21’s Ocean Archive, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, among others.