Islands of Change is a long-term artistic research project that approaches water as both a companion in crisis and a current of solidarity. Guided by Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, it reimagines islands as interconnected nodes in a living constellation – distinct yet linked by flows of sound, memory, and struggle.

Its first iteration at Gaudeamus Festival 2025 in collaboration with Residenties in Utrecht, UMU Utrecht and Cervantes Institute unfolded as a “sonic archipelago” of installations, performances, and collective listening. From the mangroves of Kiribati to the banks of the Blue Nile, trance traditions in Karachi, and Utrecht’s canal beds, the works trace connections between ancestral knowledge, environmental fragility, contested infrastructures, and diasporic resilience.

Bringing together artists through open call residencies and international collaborations, Islands of Change amplified local voices as microcosms of systemic possibility. It invited audiences to move beyond spectatorship toward shared response, weaving polyphonic networks across geographies and generations to imagine and enact worlds otherwise.