immigrants

VUMA Soner honours the voices, stories and talent of people of colour in Scandinavia. It is an app created by VUMA Projects with geo-triggered immersive audio experiences. This chapter of the app contains a collection of thoughts, reflections, and conversations, remembered or spontaneous, tied to specific landmarks, buildings and areas in the city of Bergen. The authors are all living in Bergen, some speaking in Norwegian and some in English. The sounds can be accessed in six central locations through a free downloadable app, which can be combined into one long, or multiple small walks. Production of the app is supported by the City of Bergen, the Arts Council of Norway and BEK.

How to access the appTo find the app, go to an app store (Google Play or App Store) on your mobile device. Search for “VUMA Soner” and download it for free. Create an account and select the walk. The audio experiences are linked to GPS locations and will be triggered when you walk into the zone of your selected walk. If your signal is weak in some areas, you can download the walks onto your device beforehand. Just be sure to keep the GPS on.

An explosion sends you, the reader, from your boat in the Mediterranean into what Homer called the salt immortal sea only to be rescued by a mysterious ancient watercraft. Aboard this boat, you encounter allegorical characters from ancient and modern times, locked in a dangerous power struggle, passing secrets, currying favor, creating enemies, and fostering unrest. In this interactive story, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the most abject and disenfranchised of global citizens in epic terms. In Salt Immortal Sea, we explore the international crisis of the refugee by placing the reader on a boat leaving Syria, set adrift on an indifferent, turbulent sea. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to survive. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? Salt Immortal Sea will be presented as a stand-alone iPad app (which can be projected or viewed on the device itself). An earlier version of Salt Immortal Sea was displayed in installation form at ELO 2017 in Porto.