
Event
24 July, 2025
Artists in Residence: Sara Sowell (USA), QOA and Primeiro (AR)
BAL Residency
On July 24 at 19.00, Baltic Analog Lab and the Skaņu Mežs festival invite you for a listening experience and multi-projection performance featuring the July artists-in-residence at BAL: Sara Sowell (USA), QOA and Primeiro (AR).
Sara Sowell is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker working with expanded cinematic form. During her time in residency she has been exploring depicting “empty” images and working with 16mm color processes to create abstract imagery. On July 24th, she will present a multiple-projection performance. The materials in this performance were created using repetitive printing processes of images of equipment used to manipulate the color seen on the film strip, such as a darkroom color enlarger. This visual representation of the filmic process invites the spectator to engage in an experience rather than produce meaning.
QOA is a sound artist and researcher from Argentina whose work investigates how sound occupies space and alters matter through vibration and resonance. Her practice explores listening as a somatic and relational act — a way of perceiving the world that extends beyond the ears and into the entire body. Through fieldwork, collaborative processes, and transdisciplinary inquiry, she cultivates a daily practice of listening that transforms perception and generates new modes of connection between bodies, environments, and temporalities. Her research engages with ecological, geosonic, and affective entanglements, exploring how sound can be a threshold to inhabit the world otherwise.
Primeiro (Argentina) is a solo project that blends minimalism with organic textures, using hypnotic sequences, live processing, and acoustic elements to create immersive, evolving soundscapes. Rooted in improvisation and spectral explorations, Primeiro evokes memory and transformation through intricate rhythmic patterns and layered harmonics. The project engages deeply with listening as a sensorial and poetic practice, revealing hidden resonances and inviting the audience into a state of deep melting minds perception.
In parallel, he leads Feed the River, a series of site-specific performances and festivals that use rivers as sound carriers to foster new forms of ecological awareness and collective resonance.
For this event QOA and Primeiro invite you for a listening experience, which opens a window into their recent sound works developed during BAL Residency. The sonic pieces include a series of field recordings and instrumental compositions gathered and created over the past year across different parts of the world, in collaboration with diverse people, landscapes, and environments. These sonic fragments form part of a larger ongoing exploration into territory, resonance, and collective perception.
The event will take place in the Baltic Analog Lab 2nd-floor residence rooms, Lienes iela 19a.
Event language: English.
Free admission, drinks for donation.
Baltic Analog Lab Residency is supported by the Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation.

