The Sonic Acts Biennial 2026, titled Melted for Love, explores the sounds of home. It proposes friendly ways of feeling (at) home, technologies of welcoming, and open-ended invitations to participate in hospitality. With ‘melted for love’ as its guide, it seeks to animate closeness and friendship. Instead of seeing strangers everywhere, it embraces the world as a mesh of souls – human and otherwise – woven together. If home is love – love as a network of family, friendship, kinship, and beyond – this Biennial foregrounds communities that work in solidarity, exchanging exhaustion for tenderness.
Attentiveness, respect, and care are essential expressions of love, and this is what we enact each time we listen closely. The voice has long been a force for liberation and resistance, and in a time when free speech is under threat and empty noise abounds, our task is to cultivate spaces of openness – blueprints for the institutions yet to come.
We share the sense of slowly losing home, as solid ground – our public institutions and familiar cultures – tumbles under the pressures of populism. The Sonic Acts Biennial builds on the legacy of collectivism, free spirit, and experimentation that defined previous editions of the festival, investigating how radical listening and making can open new pathways of communication and togetherness.
The curatorial process, shaped by five distinct voices, has been guided by collective listening. Inspired by the verses of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish – echoed in the Biennial’s title – the programme offers listening prompts for times of war, transition, and exile. To be ‘melted for love’ is to dissolve into gentleness, to stand against violence, and to open ourselves to vulnerability. The questions that follow chart this horizon: How can sound bring us closer to home? What is a folk song, and can it be liberated? Can grief be censored, and what is the history of lament songs? Can we learn the importance of listening from Indigenous practices? How might we rethink musical legacies to include those who have been excluded? What can rituals teach us, and how can they be staged through sound? How can radio transmission become a tool of solidarity in exile? How is sound used in warfare? What is the sound of space, of territory? Who gets to have a voice, and how does voice translate to music? And how might listening together open us to unconditional hospitality, to love – even in conditions of lovelessness?