Phloem Sap (2025)
Quadraphonic audio-visual live performance (32 mins)
Commissioned by BEK for their symposium
The Only Lasting Truth Is Change:
Voice - Seed - Brutality
21. November 2025 at Østre, Bergen (NO)
Niklas Adam:
Modular synth, SuperCollider, self built electronics
Jenny Berger Myhre: Live electronics, live visuals, voice, acoustic objects,
water, lichen and moss
Excerpt from the live stream of BEK Symposium, Østre. Photo below: Nayara Leite (BEK)
Photos from out residency at BEK, spring 2025, developing the work:
Phloem Sap reflects on what it means for something to be natural, and where the border between nature and humans blur; how experience and knowledge invisibly gets transported through us and stored within and between us, like myccorhizal symbiosis.
By creating suggestive sound worlds, Jenny and Niklas encourage the audience to seep into their own imagery and associations, speculating on how different sounds could belong to each other, inasmuch as how human beings could belong to the natural environment. Using synthesis and processing acoustic instruments and objects, they create a foley soundscape that mimics or synthesises field recordings.
The visuals are a mix of live macro videography of a miniature diorama made of moss, lichen, rocks and biomaterial sculptures; photogrammetry of real-world natural environments; and frame interpolation of the sculptures.
The BEK symposium received support from Arts Council Norway, Fritt Ord, the City of Bergen, Vestland County Council, KORO, Balansekunst and the Bergesen Foundation.
Part of New Perspectives for Action – a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.
Phloem Sap was also performed at Verdensteatret as part of Seeing Sound followed by a conversation with Kim Hiorthøy.
Filmed by Espen Sommer Eide.
