MAAR – resonant margins

Aracaju is not merely a geographical city; it is an essay on the limit. Situated at the friction between the advancement of asphalt and the persistence of mud, it personifies the space where land and water negotiate a mutual existence. At MAAR RESONANT MARGINS — Exhibition of Experimental Music, Acousmatics and Sound Poetics — we start from the premise that we live in a time of exhausted thresholds. Our climatic, social, technological, and political borders have become fragile membranes, fracture lines that reveal the world’s vulnerability, but also its potential for reconstruction and invention.

The Threshold as Opening

In this curatorship, the threshold is never a static place. It is simultaneously a point of rupture and a potential opening — a shifting territory where materials, ideas, and bodies meet for mutual transformation. Inhabiting these unstable zones demands a new acoustemology: a listening that does not seek the safety of firm ground, but learns to navigate the fluidity of the “in-between” of the interzones.

By exploring the fragility of these limits, we renounce the illusion of stability. In this program, fragility is not read as weakness, but as the radical strength to (re)invent spaces of resonance amidst crisis. It is in the crevices — in the wear and tear of matter, in the silence that precedes the storm, in the absence that resonates — that we find our most vital creative forces.

Listening to the Friction Zones

Exploring sound in the Anthropocene — or under the “Intrusion of Gaia,” as proposed by Isabelle Stengers — requires recognizing the value of care and mutation. In Aracaju, the fracture is audible: the cry of suffocated mangroves and the invasive noise of machines compete for the air with estuarine biophony. The exploratory music we propose inhabits exactly this intersection. It does not attempt to resolve the tension but rather to make it audible, transforming the crisis into a field of deep attention.

Inspired by the communal organization of the Kīsêdjê peoples, we understand that sonic performance is the rite that keeps thresholds open. Sound is the political tool that redefines the “sharing of the sensible”, allowing non-human voices and marginalized noises to occupy the center of the listening experience.

Resonance and Mutation

MAAR 2026 invites the public to an ethical positioning: accepting the place of the intermediary. Here, the work of art is a testament to the human capacity to generate euphoria from precariousness. Like the rites of passage that mark the transition between states of being, this festival uses acousmatics to lead us through the threshold between what we were and what we dare to become.

In a world of fractures, resonance is what allows us to inhabit the limit without collapsing. Welcome to the friction zone.

WHO MAKES MAAR RESONANT MARGINS?

• Dudu Prudente – General Direction & Curatorship
• Gilberto Monte – General Direction & Curatorship
• Ana Marinho – Executive Production
• Carol Angelo – Production
• Sérgio Campos – Lighting Design
• Guilherme Werneck – Communications Director
• Samia Jacintho (Casa Rex) – Design
• Gabrielle Lima – Social Media Management
• Sarah Lima – Social Media Management
• Djina Torres – Press Relations