Sound as Counter-Cartography

Sound as Counter-Cartography is a three-day workshop examining sound as a counter-cartographic practice and a situated mode of producing, mediating and transmitting knowledge. Led by musician, sound artist and emergency physician Dania Shihab, the workshop will utilize sound harvesting, alternate field recording methods and collective listening, inviting participants to consider how sonic practices can challenge dominant modes of representing territory and encouraging them to cultivate forms of memory, ecological transformation and embodied experience that resist conventional mapping.

Working across objects, sites and environmental datasets, participants will explore sound as both material and data, translating traces of collective memory, extraction, climate change and biodiversity loss into compositional structures. The workshop concludes by considering the body itself as both a map and a sensing system, using live biometric data to register neurological and physiological responses to environmental stimuli and exploring how these changes can shape and modulate sonic composition. Through these approaches, sound becomes a means of tracing relationships between territory, memory, ecology and the body that remain otherwise difficult to map.

Familiarity with Ableton Live and field recording techniques is encouraged, although not necessary.

Dania Shihab – Sound artist, musician, and emergency medicine doctor. Born in Baghdad and raised in Tasmania, she is currently based in Barcelona. Her practice examines identity through the lens of her own conflict-induced forced migration, using sound to question contemporary notions of borders and displacement. She is particularly drawn to memory and meaning, and how they can act as bridges to discarded or marginalized cultures. 

Shihab has performed at venues and festivals including Café OTO (London) and Sonic Acts (Amsterdam). A 2024/25 SHAPE+ platform artist for experimental audiovisual art, she is the founder of the experimental label Paralaxe Editions, with releases on Geographic North, Ecstatic, Superpang, OOH-sounds, and Longform Editions.