In the light of today’s challenges of our present times, the 12th edition of SONICA Festival – Paradise Haunted Garden – will take place between August and October 2020 in an alternative format. The festival will take form be carried out in three clusters: residencies, a garden concert series, and the exhibition, to which we will add, if and as much as possible, our festival week in at the end of September. The garden as an art form and as a paradise in its highest, most complete variation, will serve as our frames of thought for this year's edition.

Starting from the writings of Derek Jarman, his delineation between an abundant and a regulated garden, and the garden as a total artwork that is at the same time a place, a process and a state of mind, the festival is organised in the a form of a garden as well. In times of unpredictability, we look for perseverance and and abundance; in times of draught, we offered residency spaces and looked for forms that might persevere despite potential lockdowns or self-isolation regulations.

The festival started with a series of concert pre-events – Sonica Series: The Garden Concerts, located in different outdoor venues and gardens across Slovenia. Among them were Bowrain & KALU at Kamfest in Kamnik, Širom at the Square of the French Revolution in collaboration with Indigo Festival, and the Sound Garden with Širom, Svetlana Maraš and WAVE installation at the Koper Regional Museum.

In September, the public program centerscentres around the Paradise Haunted Garden exhibition (8 – 27 September at Equrna Gallery) that joins new commissioned works by international artists in response to the theme. The festival offered symbolic gardens – residencies for international artists, supporting the creation of new works. Having found ourselves in a time of extreme fragility of values, structures and world organisationsorganizations, this cluster is an attempt of seeing artworks as gardens, created in times of rupture. Apart from the Equrna Gallery, where installation works are exhibited, the exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls with the sound compositions, located in different gardens accrossacross the city during the festival week. Simina Oprescu's Ludus composition, based on the children's hopscotch game, will be exhibited in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Svetlana Maraš's sound garden will colorcolour the atrium of the Regional Museum Koper and Clara de Asís's composition will be located next to Čolnarna in Tivoli Park.

Alongside these clusters, the festival offers the PSSST! conversations. Apart from the new podcast series with conversations with artists, we will debate on present challenges of the internationalisation of the Slovenian music scene and the realities of event non/or organisation in times of covidCovid-19. Join us also for the artist meet and greet sessions and the public interviews (this year with Lisa Stenberg and KIR).  

And finally, if times allow, the fourth island might appear: the festival week, from 22th to 26th of September, with five concert evenings in different locations accrossacross the city, with premieres, screenings and sound performances.

The festival week will start with the opening of Jenna Sutela's video work Holobiont. In times when humans are virus distributors, this older work by the Finnish artist presents the idea of the human body as a carrier bag that distributes seeds and as a potential carrier of future generation aliens. Going a step forward from the usual gut-–brain connection, Sutela explores the bacteria Bacillus subtilis as another mind that inhabits our bodies, shifting the perspective to the radical limits of both environments the bacteria inhabits: from inside our guts to the outer space, where it is used as a test species in space flight experiments.

On Wednesday, we transport to the future, in which the future humans look back onto on the abandoned, desert landscapes in which Yugoslav spomeniks function as the last witnesses ofto human civilisations past in Johann Johannsson's The Last and First Men. In Vigroux and Schmitts' Chronostasis, time stops and then reinverts again, while the Thursday's program lands our human feet and consciousness in an actual garden. »After years of collaborations with different musicians, I felt the urge to immerse myself in a dialguedialogue with nature. Nature inspires me, calms me down and helps me keep in touch with myself and grounds me with its uncompromising presence.« Choosing locations heavily polluted with noise resulting from human activity, Brgs's BRGS's In_Dependece project aims to incorporate the human noise pollution as a compositional element and to bring awareness to our dependence on the environementenvironment. Following a decade of thirsty ears expectations, Kleemar will follow with a premiere of his debut album no love in modern world, a title that reflect the actual fragility of values of our times. The album was created and finalised during the lockdown, and while perceiving his music creation as a play with the machines, Kleemar undoubtedly leaves a mark on the Slovenian musical landscape. The Friday program will take us in to the world of attentive listening, silence, non-interventionism, and responsiveness – we will immerse ourselves into in the musical worlds of three musicians: Clara de Asís, and the duo of Maja Osojnik and Irena Tomažin. The Saturday finale will be loud and powerful. Landing in Slovenian Youth Theatre for the first time, we will first initially be literally blown by Peter Kutin's ROTOR, that attempts to centercentre speed as a metaphor for our current society, ; this will be followed by an exploration into monumental characteristic of the legendary Synthi 100 by the Swedish composer Lisa Stenberg, and finally, the merging of Balkan sound heritage with atmospheric club sounds in the long awaited live performance by KIR.

From the gut to outer space, from machines to inner spaces, inhabited by memories of sounds, from music in pauses between sounds to the testing of our human and machine physical limits, we welcome you to listen alone or in pairs to the merging of outer and inside inner worlds, and walk through this year's festival gardens, attuning our your ears to haunting glimpses of paradises that might arise.

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The program includes artists presented by SHAPE Platform: Clara de Asís, Peter Kutin, Svetlana Maraš, Aloïs Yang, Simina Oprescu and kӣr. The educational program was developed in partnership with SIGIC and supported also by SHAPE PLATFORM. SONICA Festival is co-founded by the CREATIVE EUROPE.