Where does your voice belong? Opening concert, community, and public dialogue

It was already said in ancient Greece: Human beings are social creatures.

Our nature unfolds in relationships. There is an I, and there is a we. And in between, the systems we create to bind us together.

Joanna Bailie created City Lines by travelling Oslo’s public transport routes, capturing field recordings from the network that keeps the city in motion, where thousands meet and pass each other daily, each carrying their own rhythms, dreams, and desires.

At Deichman Bjørvika, one hundred people with cassette players move through the library building, forming shifting sonic constellations in José Maceda’s iconic work Cassettes 100—a lo-fi, living response to high-tech spatial audio, where the bodies themselves become loudspeakers.

Nina T. Karlsen has spent the past year exploring the role of the conductor. Who is this figure, so central to holding the choir together, yet also charged, and closely bound up with power and authority? In Det utstrakte, created with Erik Dæhlin, Karlsen returns to the choir as a solo conductor, and a new relationship begins to take shape.

A collective is something we are always in the process of making. John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather addresses power, social apathy, and civil disobedience. What inspires us to raise our voices in the public sphere, and what holds us back? Questions that remain acutely relevant, and which artists and audiences discuss after the performance in a public dialogue moderated by the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue.

Join Ultima 2025—and let your own voice resonate within the festival!