“The fall of a certain planet” — Rafał Kołacki (exhibition)

Rafał Kołacki. Hearing a place

Rafał Kołacki – sound artist, musician, researcher and curator – will present an exhibition at Fonomo Music & Film Festival rooted in his fascination with sound as a trace of place, memory and human experience. His sound installations show that listening can also be a way of understanding the world.

Sound as a tool for understanding

A place can be photographed. It can be described, painted or filmed. But it can also be recorded – and then it becomes clear that its history is preserved not only in images and words, but also in reverberations, noises, vibrations, voices and seemingly random sounds.

It is precisely this invisible dimension of space that Rafał Kołacki has been exploring for years. His work operates at the intersection of sound art, experimental music, field recording and site-specific art. In his installations, performances and research projects, he treats listening as a cognitive tool. He records the acoustic traces of places and infrastructure, documents the sounds of natural environments and human voices, searching within them for signs of memory and stories that are not always immediately visible.

His practice makes use of hydrophones, contact microphones and custom-built listening systems. Through them, sound ceases to be merely musical material. It becomes a language, a carrier of meaning – a document, a memory, a testimony to changes in space, or a way of telling the stories of people living on the margins.

From landscape to the experience of exclusion

Kołacki is the author of numerous projects combining fieldwork with artistic research. In Echo Grało, he explored water and the acoustic landscapes of Poland and Iceland. ITO addressed migration through voices and intimate listening spaces, while in Skowyt he worked with people experiencing homelessness, examining the relationships between sound, memory and social exclusion.

His works have been presented at festivals including Unsound, CTM and MUTEK. He is also a co-founder of the musical projects HATI, Łubin and B_U_K, with which he has released dozens of albums and played hundreds of concerts in Poland and abroad, as well as the founder of the independent label Noisen Records.

At Fonomo, Kołacki will remind us that sound does not have to be only music. It can also be a trace – of a place, an event, a person. Sometimes all it takes is to stop and listen in order to find it.

The exhibition will take place at the Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz.

Exhibition partner and sponsor: Tesla Electrorecycling