Survival kit cricket

At sunrise or sunset, a group gathers for a sound walk in urban nature. They move together as a pod, attending to specific details in the environment and pointing them out through a communication system of silent marks and gestures. Every now and then, they begin to sound: one person, then another, then more, until the group becomes a temporary insect chorus — crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas, katydids. Intruders or cohabitants? Hybrid species, or a sonic guerrilla on a rewilding mission? As the participants play, they lose and find themselves a little differently in the environment.The sound stops as suddenly as it started, and the pod moves on, crossing the terrain until it finds a new place to begin again.

Survival Kit Cricket was Myriam Van Imschoot’s proposal for Survival Kit, the international contemporary art festival in Riga, where she was invited by curator Gundega Laiviņa. Founded in 2009 in response to Latvia’s economic crisis, Survival Kit treats survival not as a dramatic slogan, but as a cultural, political and social question. Each edition invites artists and curators to imagine alternative ways of living, enduring, adapting and caring under changing conditions.

“Cricketing” has long been a sound signature in Myriam Van Imschoot’s work. The technique appears in works such as What Nature Says, Chorus in CC, newpolyphonies, newpolyphonies rewired and A Song for Everyone. In contrast to these earlier works, Survival Kit Cricket prepares participants through a workshop for a collective action: a group dérive with agency.

The work takes an interventionist approach. Participants develop a playful interaction with one another and with urban nature, acknowledging its hybrid aspects while opening possibilities for engagement through fabulation and social imagination. Guided by the insect lesson, they become the designers of their own dérive, occasionally sounding together as part of a larger ecology of attention.

Survival Kit Cricket explores how humans can temporarily join broader ecologies of sound, listening and cohabitation.