Some gatherings are performances. Earth & Ether is something else – though it would resist telling you exactly what.

Spoken word poet, Page Dina speaks first. Their poetry is intimate in the way that good storytelling is intimate: close to the bone, quietly precise, the kind of language that finds something in you. Composer and Sound Designer Callum Kuhl answers with sound that is the opposite of small. Orchestral in its ambition, cinematic in its weight, his compositions don’t underscore the words so much as open the floor beneath them.

Each iteration of Earth & Ether brings different artists into that play – each bringing their own unique architecture and instincts into a structure that is deliberately, productively unfinished. The musicians listen to the poetry as it’s spoken and respond in real time. Nothing is fixed.

This iteration introduces Botanicas: ambient sound and installation artist whose practice moves through forests, oceans, and the living systems that connect them. Their sound is ecological and glitchy, built from field recordings and biofeedback synthesis, drawn from the frequency of things that don’t use language. Where Kuhl builds outward, Botanicas burrows in. The contrast is not accidental.

Together, Earth & Ether investigates how meaning can influence sound, and how sound can change meaning. It is made to be something closer to ceremony than concert and is unrepeatable by design.

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About The Artists
Page Dina is a poet and performer whose work sits at the intersection of spoken word, somatic practice, and live art. They have performed at TEDx, Speak The Mind Festival, and other notable stages across Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their poetry is concerned with spirit, resilience, and relationship – using language as a way of listening rather than declaring.

Callum Kuhl is an award-winning composer and sound designer. He works across keys, electronics, and orchestral texture to build soundscapes that are expansive without being decorative – cinematic in their architecture, attentive in their detail.

Botanicas is an ambient sound and installation artist working at the intersection of ecological systems and sonic perception. Their practice excavates the hidden acoustic dimensions of forests, oceans, and the living systems that connect them – through generative synthesis, biofeedback, and field recordings that make environmental frequency available to human ears.