Peter Sramek with Franco Lapache
We need a Promise is a project about hope. Hope that if we can understand how critically our existence is linked with other lifeforms on the planet, we may be able to alter our current human trajectory. Our squabbles, our wars, our habits of environmental destruction are out of control. Although in the popular imagination whales have come to symbolize the awe-inspiring power of nature, the fact is they have been decimated by humans, most recently throughout the 20th century for fine oil to lubricate our weapons of war. We can lament and call for protections, but in reality we must find how we as a species can change and to make a promise to protect the earth’s ecosystems from ourselves. A deeper connection to other lifeforms may help.
Whales have been on the earth for millennia. Observed in their ocean home, they surface and disappear with slowly arcing forms, One is reminded of the insignificance of human time. They breathe and they dive, majestically unconcerned with the human condition. We crawl on the surface, tinkering with our technologies, a tiny blink in geological terms. It is just possible they will still be here, traversing the oceans, when humanity has destroyed itself. Maybe experiencing these beings can inspire us to action, to make amends.
Promise is a collaboration with Italian sound artist Franco Lapache. We met on the island of Faial in the Azores in March, 2025. I was there to volunteer on a scientific Cetacean study with Biosphere Expeditions and Lapache for a sound art residency. Photographed from the shifting deck of the expedition boat, digitally processed and composited with Franco’s audio tracks and added video manipulations, the sensation of the constantly moving ocean can be experienced bodily through the layered collages and AR video additions.
Download the Artivive application to a phone and view the collages above to play six videoswith draft audio tracks created in collaboration with Franco Lapache. A draft web page with expedition data tracks is also in process.
A Promise, Initial concept demo, Sramek and Lapache, April 2025.
Samples of Related Previous Works
Peter Sramek
The Abstraction is not the Reality, 2024
The Zancudo Projects Exhibited:
The Tett Gallery, Kingston ON, 2024.
Photographs from the remote beach of Playa Zancudo in the south of Costa Rica point to the need for us to drastically change our consumption habits. The abstract compositions of bright colour and texture attract the eye only to reveal themselves as bits of plastic pollution on dark sand, waves of patterned detritus created by the surf. Our superficial perception of the images as benignly aesthetic, reminiscent of 20th century paintings, mimics our tendency to distance our thinking about difficult issues. Only on closer observation do we see what is really there.
Full Artist Statement: abstraction.sramek.ca
Still Life – Navigating 2020
Exhibited: Wuhan Public Art Museum, China, 2021.
Still Life – Navigating 2020 builds on a prescient video installation titled Ether Navigation (2005) which considered how new generations were learning to ‘swim’ in virtual worlds that require immersion in new realities. Yet, physical nature has been the driving force these COVID months and Still Life responds to the pandemic as we all learn to navigate today. Even as we shelter in the virtual, away from natural threats, it is the natural world which sustains us and gives us hope. In these artworks, small vignettes taken from nature (nature morte as the French call them) suggest that there is still life, even in the cycles of death and rebirth.
Additional video installation works on Vimeo at video.sramek.ca
Franco Lapache
“Circum Sonoro”, 2025, Faial / Azores Islands,
Sound performance from field recording research presented in Capelo.
The artist’s research on the island of Faial is translated into a collage of sounds that reflect the nature of the island, spontaneous encounters, moments of heartfelt music and compositional ideas inspired by the elements that surround it.
“E canterà”, 2025, Berlin (DE),
Sound performance presented at SoundsAbout gallery, 2025.
“We will need more water tanks”, 2024
Campione del Garda (IT),
Aleatoric composition presented at UdK in Berlin in May 2024
The piece called “We will need more water tanks” is related to climate change phenomena. I decided to work with the water level of Lake Garda, which in 2023 due to a severe drought, reached historical minimum levels. In my research, I wanted to relate the audio samples that I took from areas of the lake (which I classified as “wet” and “dry”) with the graphical data of the water level of Lake Garda for the year 2023.
Full artist statement: “We will need more water tanks“
“E canterà”, a phrase that means “and it will sing” in Italian, is a sound performance that revisits the repertoire of northern Italian mountain songs, focusing on their extinction in the panorama of Italian cultural and social heritage.
The sweet selection of songs, sung by the choir “Le Rocce Roche” and recorded by the artist in the church of the Centro Paolo VI in Brescia, meets the decay and instability of the old magnetic tape in cassette format. With the help of the cassette recorder and 4 different loudspeakers, the artist reworks the repertoire using the “phasing” technique, playing back the same song for each loudspeaker, making sure that they are not synchronized in time with each other.
The new sounds that emerge emphasize the importance and expressive power of the voice in this repertoire, an essential and irreplaceable instrument. The drama of the words combined with the textures created by the tapes reinforce the phenomenon of extinction and memory.