Listening Session: Don't Bring an Instrument - Sonic Commons

Welcome to a collective Listening Session with material produced in the workshop Sonic Commons, which took place at in January 2026 as a part of the public program for LIBERATION RADIO. Sonic Commons was a workshop by Don’t Bring an Instrument (a sound art platform run by Aron Fogelström and Stella Dieden Richter).

This listening session invites a new audience to experience selected excerpts from the January workshop using a multichannel speaker setup, followed by an open discussion. No preparation is needed; the session offers a moment of collective listening and reflection on how we relate to urban environments through voicing, and ways of capturing and archiving a medium as elusive as sound.

In the workshop Aron Fogelström and Stella Dieden Richter invited participants to join them in translating the ambient noise of the city into a speculative collective body. Through the natural leaking properties of sound, the workshop aimed to open ways for dissolving individual ownership in order to reach new ways of relating to urban space together with others.

Don’t Bring an Instrument is a sound art platform run by Aron Fogelström and Stella Dieden Richter. Focusing on participatory and embodied ways of working with sound art, they have hosted two courses at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm: Off-site (Spring 2024) and Leakage as Resistance (Spring 2025) involving a public performative presentation at Reaktorhallen.

Aron Fogelström is an audio-visual artist and filmmaker who explores linguistic science fiction through sound, architecture and speculative storytelling. His practice incorporates voices, bodies and spaces to examine belonging, disorientation and collective sense-making in contemporary life. He holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art (KKH) in Stockholm, where he studied in the professor groups of Ming Wong and Tris Vonna-Michell. His work has been presented in contexts including the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin (2023), Nobel Week Lights (Stockholm, 2023), Stockholm School of Economics (2024), and Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinéma in Marseille (2025). In 2026, he will present a duo exhibition with Raimo Saarinen at ArtLab Gnesta.

Stella Dieden Richter is an artist based in Stockholm and currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the Royal Institute of Art (KKH). Working with performance, installation, and sound, she explores how bodies resist, adapt to, and are shaped by infrastructures and systems of pressure. Her practice focuses on exhaustion, transmission, and what lingers when force is applied and withdrawn. She has a background in ballet and architecture, as well as in punk. In the latter, she co-founded and performed with Kulturprofilerna 2021–22. Her work has been shown at Konsthall C (2025), Nuit Blanche (Institut suédois, Paris, 2025), Lyssningsrummet (2025), and Liljevalchs Vårsalong (2023). A master’s solo presentation at Galleri Mejan is in development for 2026.