Sleepless Footscray Festival: UnKnowing Madness

Renowned Victorian sound artist Thembi Soddell has adapted their acousmatic composition, UnKnowing Madness, to an intimate installation to be experienced by one audience member at a time - on a bed, in complete darkness.

This composition grew from an online workshop series that invited four participants with complex trauma, but without their own experimental arts practice, into Soddell's process of composing. This process involves abstracting recorded real-world sounds, then shaping them to reflect the intangibility, gaps, and wordlessness of the impact of trauma on the inner world. Participants were Amrita Dasvarma, Melis Layik, Kim Le and Hassaan Memon.

Based on sounds and ideas developed through the workshops, the work embodies aspects of everyone's individual yet entangled lived experiences of trauma. It traverses themes of grief, the pain of isolation versus strength in walking alone, anxiety, mood swings, and the lingering impacts of trauma on our relationship to everyday sounds.

Ticket bookings essential for this one-at-a-time, one-of-a-kind experience.