This paper offers an overview of the process and preliminary results of a collaborative research project, commissioned by Stockholm Regional Council Culture Department and AISAB, the largest provider of ambulance care services in Stockholm, Sweden. The project aimed to explore, in practical terms, how artistic and design methods could transform and improve the experience of ambulance interiors. To this aim, different artistic and design disciplines were convoked, notably sound art and symphonic orchestral music, material artistic practice and architectural lighting design. Focusing here on the music and sound design aspects, the resultant installation hardware and sound materials were subsequently deployed and tested within an operational ambulance space, with initial feedback from paramedics and patients utilised to begin to ascertain the effectiveness of the project’s contribution to creating a more pleasant and engaging soundscape and acoustic experience within this singular, fast-paced and dynamic healthcare environment.

The paper presentsand explores a series ofsonic activities, maneuvers and approaches, which were co-devised and developed by the author for Magazzino Brancaccio,in Palermo, Sicily.This project, originated and presented by curator Valentina Sansone, aimed at the accessing and appropriation of properties confiscated from organized crime, and the repositioning of these as sites for the curatorial, as well as for community-based and experimental sound and music activations, and other forms of contemporary arts intervention. In 2018, the first of these initiatives took place, within a 2000 square meter confiscated warehouse, located in the Brancaccio areaof the city. Through the efforts of the project, the space was opened and ultimately returned to its community. The paper reflects upon the central role that sound played in this process of taking possession and infiltrating the space, and the ways in which the interconnected practices of listening, sound-making and musicking, were of central importance to encouraging members of the local community to re-discover, interact with and inhabit the space anew. I suggest that the call to creative action through sound and engagement with the local environment and materials to hand contributes to the social transformations that ensue, not only conceptually, but as a dynamic, embodied and lived condition.

This paper presents a series of contemporary artistic methods and collective actions based on the pioneering work of the French avant-garde group Art et action (Aea, 1919-1939). Aea actively responded to the fast-changing society of their time through their innovative “theatre laboratory”, an experimental artistic research environment in which actors and audience were invited to investigate together the rhythmic order of urban routines and rituals, through the re-enactment of daily urban atmospheres. Based on Aea’s methods and concepts, atelier Area aims at responding to today’s deep physical, sensorial and social transformation of the city by re-acting contemporary urban routines and rituals through public improvisations and interventions. Three concrete examples will be presented here.