A shelter
From monitored trees to disappearing buildings, the project listens to what is unheard: ultrasonic networks, contested habitats and the stories of those who, like bats, navigate the night, build nests and resist disappearance. The shelter becomes a space of refuge for the artists and the audience. It is a space of resistance in response to the disappearance of cultural spaces in Eindhoven.
The project is built collectively on site, from an array of works created by members of the collective. On site, they re-visit their work through a bat's lense : from housing crisis, out of human hearing spectrum networks, to counter culture and communication within the land.
Collective walking and sensing and fieldwork precede the on-site work. They serve as a basis for the collective narration. Sound installations, performances and visuals will come to life inside the shelter, shaped by bat field recordings, live composition, and collaborative storytelling.
Inviting bats
Bats live between rural and urban edges, they witness the interactions and the fractures within the land. They meet the inhabitants of cities, hear their steps, fly above agriculture fields and hunt on monitored trees. Bats need the old buildings, its brick and enclosed spaces where they can hope to hide and not be disturbed.
They are endangered and protected yet munipalities continue to tear down buildings to build new ones. However, new expensive white boxes neither sustain bats nor nurture cultural space. Bats made us hope for a resistance of destruction, protected by legislation, their survival defends spaces of cultural creation. Yet we are not polite to them : we blast light where predators should be sleeping, we make walls vibrate where their fragile homes are laid.
Bats see through sound, they echo, they map the invisible, and navigate the night by touch and vibration. How do we create with other senses in mind? How do we draw from bat symbolism a narrative that helps us understand them, or at least listen? Bats do not ask to be welcomed. Like them we seek shelter that lets us sense, speak, and return. To invite them is to fight for the right to stay, and to create.
