Sound intervention in the Old Botanical Garden in Zurich, as part the Sonic Topologies festival, June 2022.

In his performance, Gilles Aubry aka DJ Flight Radar played records from the ethnological museum synchronized with planes taking off or landing in Zurich. The work examined connections between contemporary forms of “CO(2)lonialism”, airplane traffic in Zurich, as well as archival records from the ethnographic museum documenting music from Switzerland’s carbon trading partners. Aubry played records from countries that have agreements with Switzerland to support the implementation of climate change mitigation: Georgia, Peru, Senegal and Ghana.

Thanks to the Flight Radar app, the sequence of music tracks is synchronized in real time with takeoff times at Zurich Airport—preceded by a brief announcement from the DJ about the plane’s destination—thus offering a kind of “sonification” of the frenetic pace of local air traffic.

Photo documentation by Johannes Berger.