Regarding the Third Ear: VESSELS is a multidisciplinary event comprising live sound performances and a roundtable discussion with artists Ragnhild May, Cara Tolmie, Aram Lee, and Maria Chávez, convened by writer and curator Xenia Benivolski.

The project takes its title from Maryanne Amacher’s theorisation of the ‘third ear’ as a speculative mode of listening, attuned to what is unsaid, ephemeral, or affective. A pioneering American composer who passed away in 2009, Amacher treated psychoacoustic phenomena as compositional matter, radically rethinking perception and spatial acoustics.

Regarding the Third Ear: VESSELS unfolds around the dual meaning of the term ‘organology’, which refers both to the study of musical instruments and to the study of organs. Gathering frequencies associated with bodily, mechanical, sculptural, and architectural organs, as well as broader organic and inorganic systems, the programme explores resonances between physical, terrestrial, and imagined entities.

Within this framework, Danish artist Ragnhild May rethinks instruments, questioning who they are designed for and how listening is enacted through them. For this event, May presents her self-built instruments alongside Coming Out the Ear, a newly commissioned series of bronze ear sculptures that will remain on site at Zone2Source for the duration of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2026. Coming Out the Ear approaches listening as a spatial and material condition: the ear appears as both organ and object, monumental and intimate, a threshold between bodies and environments. May’s work enters into dialogue with Cara Tolmie, whose choreographed performances foreground the sounds of the body and the agency of the senses, challenging assumptions around subjectivity, projection, and vocal presence.

Also contributing to the programme is artist Aram Lee, who approaches organology as a practice of embodied and infrastructural listening. Lee recorded the internal bodies of institutions, gathering the sounds of hidden architectures of preservation alongside her own voice. Through processes of translation and modulation, her human voice becomes entangled with these institutional circulatory systems, revealing preservation as a metabolic condition shaped by extraction, toxicity, and historical violence.

Turntablist Maria Chávez works with vinyl, sourcing damaged and discarded records. Produced from PVC derived from fossil fuels, vinyl binds sound reproduction to extractive petrochemical economies and geological time. Through fragmentation, repetition, and improvisation, Chávez transforms these surfaces into sculptural sound, treating temporality as something continuously broken and reassembled.

Situated within ethical and imaginative frameworks shaped by climate precarity and infrastructural violence, Regarding the Third Ear: VESSELS asks whether listening differently, and listening through instruments, might allow us to hear the world, and one another, anew.

Timetable:
16:30–17:30 – Roundtable with all participants.
18:00 – Ragnhild May, The Body Organ
18:30 – Cara Tolmie, Internal Singing
19:20 – Aram Lee, Manifesting Gore Ideology
19:50 – Maria Chávez, Abstract Turntablism

Please note that Amstelpark’s main exits close at 17:00. After this time, the Red Bridge exit will remain open.

The program shares space with a modular sculpture installation by Ragnhild May:
Ragnhild May
Coming Out the Ear
2026
Bronze sculptures, 60 × 40 × 30 cm (outer ears)
35 × 35 × 40 cm (inner ears)