Luka Uršič (Kalu): Pod(hod), Soundwalk

The sound walk addresses Ljubljana’s underpasses, largely abandoned areas, reveal the city’s inability to imagine new urban uses and meanings. Neglected underpasses beneath the paving stones of orderly streets and squares are becoming shelters for those unheard on the margins of society.

The author listens closely to the Ajdovščina underpass. Through real-time sound capture and processing, everyday noises, silences, footsteps and echoes are transformed into an immersive sonic experience that opens up a space for what has been left unspoken. It reveals moments of unexpected beauty and places the listener in relation to space as a living, multilayered organism of unheard realities.

The Ajdovščina underpass, built on the site of a former Emona cemetery, carries deeper historical layers. Walking through these underground corridors becomes a movement through the temporalities of the city, where life, death, memory and forgetting intertwine.

Pod(hod) is conceived as a collection of associations from a day in the lives of individuals on the margins of society. The titles of the sound segments, Tunings, Silent Prayers, Gatherings of the Found, Walk of Shame, Lives Before Shop Windows, Lullaby, Morning Again and A Fragile Confrontation with Reality, do not interpret these lives, but create a space of listening in which a sensitive, open relationship to the other and to the world can emerge.

The world holds you, like it or not.

It moves you with fire and wind when it’s hot.

You’re chasing your sleep and wasting your spot —

you better start living.

The world has you turning the dirt, unforgiving,

old gravity is pulling — but love, oh love,

the night that embraced you unraveled the night.

This event is part of the accompanying programme of Luka Uršič's exhibition The Gift of Failure, on view at Grad Tivoli. Organised in collaboration with CONA Institute for Contemporary Art Processing.

Ticket link.