Webs of Power: Songs for a Secret Forest

Performance by Bérénice Gaça Courtin (artist, Paris & Geneva) & Echo Ho (sound artist, Berlin)

In this duo performance, artist Bérénice Gaça Courtin and sound artist Echo Ho come together in a sonic exchange exploring unique instruments, cryptography, and hidden communication. French artist Courtin creates soundscapes by scanning her woven fabrics, which contain sounds within them. Echo Ho, an artist born in Beijing and based in Berlin, uses traditional and electronic Chinese instruments.

Set in an imaginary forest—inspired by Pyry near Warsaw, the Białowieża Forest on the Polish-Belarusian border, and other sites of hidden communication—the performance allows the audience to experience the forest as a living network of memory, refuge, and resistance. Through song, storytelling, and codes hidden within the musical notation (audio steganography), the duo sends messages traveling through time, bodies, and landscapes.

This performance, together with the subsequent artist talk “Entanglement & Encryption,” marks the conclusion of our international group exhibition “Messenger Substances” (through August 8, 2026).