At the edge of Tempelhof — the airport that kept West Berlin fed during the 1948-49 blockade, now public parkland — there is a rainwater retention basin. Water collects in it, rots, sustains. Underground inlet pipes thread beneath the surface. At the fourth DYSTOPIA Sound Art Biennial, opening across Berlin on 26 September 2026, artists and students will turn this basin into an instrument: making audible the processes of decomposition, channelling rain prayers and water wishes through infrastructure built for a crisis that ended seventy years ago. It is a small detail in a sprawling, three-week event involving more than 40 artists, five venues, public space, and — in a curatorial choice that either signals accessibility or dilution — Instagram. But it captures something essential about what this biennial has been doing since 2018: asking what we might learn if we actually listened to the frequencies our infrastructure, our history, and our damaged environments are already producing.

The DYSTOPIA Sound Art Biennial is organised by Errant Sound e.V., an artist-run association based in Berlin. Across three previous editions, each pairing Berlin with another geography, the biennial has built a network of international partnerships The model is deliberately non-institutional: initiated, curated, and organised by artists rather than by a museum or a Kunsthalle. Artistic director Mario Asef leads a curatorial advisory board that includes Janine Eisenächer, Laura Mello, Brandon LaBelle, Georg Klein, and Julia Gerlach — names that circulate in sound art and experimental music circuits rather than the mainstream art press. LaBelle, in particular, has shaped how a generation of practitioners think about the politics of listening through his writing on acoustic territories and sonic agency. His presence here signals the intellectual register the biennial is working in.

This fourth edition, titled Global Dystopia, drops the bilateral structure of previous years in favour of something more diffuse: sound art perspectives from diverse geographical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts, gathered under the premise that dystopia is not merely a warning but a space of encounter. The biennial's own language frames it as a zone between memory and the future, loss and resistance, ecological crisis and speculative vision. This is the kind of curatorial framing that can tip into abstraction — the sort of statement that sounds urgent in a press release and evaporates in the gallery. But the specific works suggest something more grounded.

Floating University Berlin, the experimental learning and art site built into Tempelhof's retention basin, is simultaneously protected habitat, urban wilderness, and infrastructural relic. The student section works with the basin's actual acoustic properties: underground inlet pipes become instruments, decomposition is made audible, and the artistic framing treats the basin and its surrounding airport architecture as a body — with all the attendant questions of aging, trauma, and repair. This is site-specificity that earns the name. The ground itself is layered with the 20th century's heaviest freight: the airlift, the Cold War partition, the slow transformation of military infrastructure into common ground.

At HAUNT, the frontviews space on Kluckstraße, the biennial opens with three performances on 26 September: Tintin Patrone's "MUSIKONG BUMBONG expanded," Staffan Westerlund's "Trivialities and War," and Lisa W Carlson's "Imagine Human!" The exhibition runs through 11 October. What is striking about the programme is the range of registers it holds together. Gary Hill — one of the few names here with broad international recognition, a video and sound artist shown at documenta, the Venice Biennale, and virtually every major survey of media art since the 1980s — appears alongside artists like Organisms Democracy, Txulunh Gakran/João Voia, and Impulsive Habitat, many of whom operate below the threshold of mainstream art-world visibility. Workshops lean into the somatic and the ceremonial: Chia-Liang Lai's "Cosmic Orbiting: Embodied Listening through Taichi, Touch and Sound," Patricia Hegglin's "SOMA OF THE TREE – Rituals of Repair." The biennial takes the body's role in listening seriously, even when its curatorial apparatus is highly conceptual.

Across the other venues, works by Martina M. Yáñez, Simon Hill, Zeliha Dogusan, Helen Hines, Vicente Yáñez, and Yuchin Chen engage what the biennial describes as a dialogue between field recording archives and oral traditions, between sounding fungi and contemporary sound system practices. That last juxtaposition — mycological sonification meeting sound system culture — is the kind of connection that could be genuinely revelatory or merely clever. Without hearing the work, I cannot tell you which. What I can observe is that the biennial's curatorial logic consistently pairs the scientific with the spiritual, the archival with the embodied, the non-human with the deeply human.

Sound art biennials occupy a peculiar position. They lack the commercial infrastructure of a visual art biennial — no VIP preview with collectors, no prize to generate headlines. They lack the event-spectacle of a music festival — no headliner, no main stage. What they offer is duration and attention: three weeks of works that require you to be in a space, to stay, to listen. In Berlin, where the dominant cultural modes are the gallery opening and the club night — both structured around social performance — the invitation to treat listening as a political act cuts against the grain. Not because the idea is new, but because the conditions for actually doing it — sustained attention in a shared space, no phone in hand, no performative engagement — are increasingly rare.

Berlin is the ideal city for this argument. The infrastructure of listening is everywhere: in the sound design of its club culture, in the residual acoustics of its divided architecture, in the field recordings that artists have been making of its construction sites and waterways for decades. But DYSTOPIA's insistence on the global reframes Berlin not as the subject of listening but as a node in a planetary network of sonic crisis and sonic knowledge. Rain prayers alongside electromagnetic infrastructure. Indigenous oral traditions alongside fungi sonification. The biennial positions itself less as a showcase and more as an argument: that the catastrophes we face — ecological, political, mnemonic — are already sounding, and that the first act of resistance might be to hear them.

No amount of curatorial text can guarantee the work makes good on that argument. The distance between a compelling framework and a compelling experience is always uncertain, and in sound art it is especially so — the medium resists documentation, resists after-the-fact assessment. You have to be in the room. You have to be in the basin. The signals are there whether or not anyone is listening. The biennial's wager is that making you aware of that fact changes something.