SSC Workshop with Colette Aliman and Wen Chin Fu

Wen Chin Fu is a Taiwanese artist based in the Netherlands, deeply engaged in The Hague’s dynamic art scene. As a founding member of the artist organization iii (Instrument Inventors Initiative), her practice explores the intersection of performance art, sound, and technology. Over the years, she has increasingly focused on the physical relationship between body and instrument, investigating how presence and movement on stage shape the experience of sound and performance. Among her most innovative works is the sugar instrument, a creation that captures her interest in the transient and in the evolving relationship between humans and materials. Through her work, she continually redefines the boundaries between performer, instrument, and audience, creating spaces where sound becomes both a tactile and existential experience.

Colette Aliman will present a series of sound art and creative research projects that interrogate the conventions of normalised listening while creating space for alternative and unconventional listening practices. These works slip into contexts and questions rarely approached through listening, revealing how sound mediates overlooked or resistant domains. The projects engage with listening within conditions of transition, in cracks of frustration, and within spaces that have become stagnant or contested. Their sites range across borders (United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark), institutional settings (hospitals, museums, schools), and sectors (energy, farming, healthcare).From this diversified practice emerges the concept of sonic equity: a framework that redistributes attention and agency in sound. Sonic equity positions listening as a critical and inclusive practice, recognising auditory environments as contested spaces shaped by power, access, and representation. It foregrounds engagement across human and nonhuman actors, enabling diverse practices of listening and sounding to inform cultural heritage, design processes, and ecological futures.

Colette Aliman is an artist and researcher based in Rotterdam. Her work explores listening as a method for engaging with ecological, technological, and institutional systems. She is interested in the frictions that emerge within these infrastructures: how sound reveals submerged narratives, enables co-sensing across species and disciplines, and unsettles dominant ways of knowing.Her practice spans field recording, installation, alternative publishing, and participatory workshops. She often collaborates with scientists, communities, and infrastructures-in-transition, whether in hospitals, universities, farms, or proposed energy islands. She is the founder and head of Sound Office, a platform for sonic research and experimental documentation. Recent projects include Careful Listening: Shared Lands of Energy, Screen to Soundscape, Centering Listening in Designed Places of Care, and Conversations on an Energy Island.