Water is in crisis: simultaneously scarce, through drought, and threateningly over-abundant, through floods and rising seas. Today, most urban bodies of water are engineered, monitored, and manicured—channeled through pipes, reservoirs, and levees; extracted for human use, often to the last drop. As part of the Islands of Change Sonic exhibition at the Utrecht University Museum on 14 September 2025, we invite our festival guests to participate in a Silent Keynote that will collectively center water — its crises, its infrastructures, and its politics —as both method and metaphor. The format reimagines the keynote as a space of collective attunement and shared inquiry rather than individual authority of knowledge.
Islands of Change confronts the polycrisis – planetary collapse, genocide, war, tech-fascism, and growing authoritarianism – that increasingly leaves us at a loss in the face of the challenges it presents. Co-curated by Julian Rieken with Residenties in Utrecht and Gaudeamus, this long-term initiative asks: How do we reclaim our ‘response-ability’? How do we mobilize our (hyper)local ‘islands’ of artistic action to counteract rigid hierarchies, and in so doing, forge vibrant currents of solidarity? Click here for the full programme of Islands of Change.
This exhibition is part of the Ulysses Platform, co-funded by the European Union.