Sound artist and electronic musician Jessica Ekomane transforms the acoustic atmosphere of physical settings via installations and live performance, exploring the tensions and potentials of individual perception and its impact on the shaping of collective dynamics. The humble whistle, a building block of primal human communication, is a cipher in itself: it can be used as secret code, a game, a musical instrument, a tool for locating or outwitting, as well as for calling out, surveillance, and policing. Ekomane’s sonic intervention Calling all, this is our last cry before our eternal silence (2019), which populates the Gunta Stölzl Foyer, makes use of a boatswain’s call, a high-pitched whistle employed on naval ships to facilitate communication when the human voice can’t be reliably heard above the fluctuating sonic presence of open water. Its title repurposes the French Navy’s final message in January 1997 transmitted in Morse code, used in international waters to communicate maritime distress up to that point. The current, near-permanent condition of emergency at sea and the very real life-or-death situations that migrants regularly confront on the Central Mediterranean route, among others, echo here. Where survival hinges on unpredictable conditions and ad hoc strategies, the elementary sounds of the whistles become a cry that cannot be the last. The bridging of what seems like an impassable gap, its traversal made possible by rhythm and breath, suggests a self- organization of limited means, one whose subversive potential is only underscored by its simplicity.

Work in the exhibition: Calling all, this is our last cry before our eternal silence (2019), sound, 1' 27'', sound piece commissioned by Natascha Sadr Haghighian for Tribute to Whistle, one room of the installation Ankersentrum (surviving in the ruinous ruin) presented as part of the German Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019