Early on Monday, May 19, 2025, Boštjan Leskovšek passed away – sound artist, performer, poet and photographer – co-founder of the Cirkulacija 2 initiative. For the past two and a half years, his health had been steadily deteriorating due to Alzheimer’s disease. We will pay tribute to his memory on Saturday, May 24, 2025 from 6:00 PM at the Cirkulacija 2 premises in the Ajdovščina Ljubljana underpass.
Everyone who knew and loved him is invited!
Boštjan Leskovšek, born in 1965 in Ljubljana, is a sound artist and poet and co-founder of the POPOPO (POETRY BY MAIL) movement between 1996 and 2001. During this time, over fifty performances (happenings, sound poetry and correspondence poetry writing). In 2006, the poetry collection Drža Va was published. Participation at Intermediate Spaces 2006 festival at ESC Graz gallery and Kapelica Gallery; installation and event (Sound Baths). Enthusiast of technology, science, philosophy and contemporary art, I unite = socialize in the Cirkulacija 2 initiative, which has been operating in Ljubljana since 2007. The NanoŠmano project, creation with scientists and artists produced by Kapelica Gallery (2010-12). In years 2012/ 2013 part of project group 300000 VK. Employed at RTV Slovenija as video engineer. Released albums: The Nature of Patience 2007, The Desert of the Real 2008, VesOlje 2003/10, Cirkulacija 2 and Bogdana Herman 2009, Intermediate Spaces 2009, XL Experiment 2009, Surface of the Event 2010, etc…
Discography, photography, textography:
Trivia Records https://3via.org/records/index.php?opt=search&word=Bo%C5%A1tjan%20Leskov%C5%A1ek
SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/ror11
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jokel11
Locutio.si https://www.locutio.si/avtorji.php?ID=143&clanek=363
His position on sound and music is summarized from a conversation between Andrej Lutman and Boštjan Leskovšek at the end of 2011, published in the magazine Glasna (magazine of the Slovenian Musical Youth Association – volume 42, issue 6) under the title Sound and Skin.
Boštjan:
For me, music is a more articulated or more defined physical position of sound. In sound, it is increasingly open and indefinite, while music is a repeating closed system that confronts sonic openness and confirms collective feelings of social agreement and the training of life. Everything dances, all music is the same, but sound is always different. It is that without a position, without a junction. It is an unbearable openness of everything to everything. Within this movement, situational islands pop up in which happenings arise, which can be followed by events.
What then is an event?
Something very rare. It is tied to chance, a situation and a moment in which you experience the unknown and wonder. For me, nothingness is a situation without memory and history, a single future where I am without identity, deaf and blind, but I hear and see – but I don’t know.
Can you place this nothingness in a sound event?
If I place it, I hear it, but I can’t articulate it; it confuses me and makes me think, but it is no longer an event, but the past. No, I can’t place it!
Do you agree with the statement that music has a history, but sound does not?
I disagree. Music has a history, sound has the past. Music is a form of scientific method, it opens you up into one direction. Music is comparable to the cosmos, sound to chaos.
You make sound in spaces and words. What are your spatial words determined by?
I don’t know if I make sound. More I sound. I am interested in surfaces and their gaping abstractness. The intersections of events between two or more points of view lead me to perceptions of changes in repetitions. Let me illustrate: when an amplifier amplifies sound through repetition, certain statements are already torn apart, twisted into new, meaningless purposes. We have systems that are given meaning by cybernetics and studied by cognitive science. The stringing of words produces a sentence, a message, and via sounding communicates – but not qualitative – quantitative instability. This accumulation creates surfaces that are layered in space.
Surfaces constitute a space where there are also bodies that listen – bodies that receive sounds. The body is limited by the skin. So what is the impact of sounds on infection? Does sound infect?
It expands the data surface outwards and inwards and the body becomes an interface. The sound passes into the cavity of the body, the body resonates and informs the space.
So there is no silence?
Silence is the idea of nothingness. Nothingness is the idea of silence.
The basic means of your positioning between sound and silence is technology. Technology is the interface between transmission and reception. What is such a complement? Is it perhaps a refinement, a complement of human capabilities?
This is a prosthesis. It is the frailty of reason, which wants to expand from itself, for itself. I use it because of my own handicap and dissatisfaction with it. It is characterized by consumer addiction, which satisfies you for a moment and soon leaves you empty. The resulting emptiness is filled by ever newer products, better, more beautiful, more purposeful, user-friendly… You can already say to the appliance: boil the pot, cover the table, the Internet, buy me friendship… Consuming all this forces you to say: everything that is offered is forged for me. From this saturation arises a symptom. And the solution can be creation. I myself, faced with technology and its consumption, pass into destruction, I personify it, deconstruct it. Destruction nullifies purpose and meaning. This creates possibilities for new connections, different bonds, impossible possibilities. In doing so, I move into construction, accepting uselessness without meaning and purpose, which I surrender to an alienated creation.
Quite complicated… Can you illustrate this with an example?
Right. I will look back at the setup from 2008 to 2010, which consisted of a television, a contact microphone and an audio mixer. The setup was later named The Surface of Event. I connected the amplified signal of the contact microphone to the video input of the TV via a “mixer”. The audio output of the TV was connected to the mixer. This was the basic starting point for looping, “feedback”. I used the contact microphone to touch the thin electrostatic layer of the cathode ray tube. In doing so, the “mixer” amplified the audio signal from the microphone and directed it to the video input of the TV. The image on the screen changed, which also changed the electrostatic voltage of the screen and thus the sound at the output of the “mixer”.
And the result of all this?
… was an electromechanical “looping” of the image and sound, which was regulated by a thin layer of static electricity under the microphone. And it was there, on this surface, that events were created. The entire process of all this happening was a kind of detection of the surface of the event. Two years of processing and experimentation left behind recorded audio-video traces, which are available on the internet publishing house Trivia.
The technologies you use are analog and digital. Within the technologies used, there is harmonic and inharmonic distortion of sound. Is this essential for your work?
Both are useful, but the result is always analog, because I see with my eyes, listen with my ears and feel with my skin, or rather, I listen with my skin, I see with my ears and listen with my eyes. But I understand digital. I always start with unbearable noise, oversaturated distortion, but when I connect to it, a process of harmonization occurs as a result of monotony and lack of detail.
But where are the hormones here?
Excessive sound intensity is very physical. When entering the sound wall, which is – after all – a kind of scanner, the sound encounters the body’s nodes and relaxes them.
So are you involved in sound therapy?
No, but with sound experience.
How do you experience resonances?
Always as a harmonious background that invites and stuns me. I understand them as an opposition to exploring the unknown and they make it easier for me to enter the unknown soundly. So they are a kind of safe haven when discovering something new. But the mind does not trust them, but the senses adore them. So I am torn between pleasure and fear. But in between, something happens to me, a sense of wonder arises, which is my “point” of the artistic event.
Do you consider yourself an oscillator?
No, it is too boring. But an oscillator is important because of the constancy that resonates with you more in frequency.
What is the attendance at your events, installations, performances?
Minimal.
How is that?
Art is rare, hard to find, requires a lot of searching and does not offer itself. And there is something else: I do not need a passive listener or spectator, but a co-active participant. But for something like this, both of you need readiness and time. There is no such thing as love at first sound.
So you accept subsurface investments?
Let’s say that’s the case. A big investment is already curiosity, which stimulates an encounter with an experiment. Hm, all of this takes time for me. I have a hard time falling in. I’m not a typical consumer. I like to wait and watch for a special space to happen, for a situation to come to life in which an event is possible. It’s rare, but it does. The other.
Your position on the emergence of non-lethal weapons?
In terms of sound, music is a marching band, so any concert of amplified manipulation is a non-lethal weapon. Music is a regulator of our emotions and a dangerous tool in the skilled hands of the entertainment industry. Social training takes place with music.
How do you accept the label sound trainer?
That’s a musician. I do not accept it.
Do you consider yourself an inventor in art?
Yes, an inventor of the useless and strange and useless. But I don’t know if this is the art of the possible.
You are also known and recognized for eating in public at your performances, for cooking well and eating even sweeter. Is smacking one of the more resonant sounds of the skin?
Oh, of course. My motto is: a gallery is a tavern, where you eat well, drink, smoke, socialize, have fun and always experiment. It is a social space of searches, encounters. It is that material human hugging that has already become an incredible wonder in this time.
Written by Andrej Lutman
/photo-selfie: Boštjan Leskovšek/
/NOT I; photo: Alessandro Di Giampietro, 2017/
https://www.rtvslo.si/kultura/glasba/poslovil-se-je-zvocni-umetnik-bostjan-leskovsek-soustanovitelj-cirkulacije-2/746506
