Aimée Portioli | Grand River
Symphony for Endangered Birds
7-channel sound installation, duration: 28'
Concept, musical composition, sound design, spatialization and installation production by Aimée Portioli
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Symphony for Endangered Birds is a new 7-channel sound installation by composer and sound artist Aimée Portioli, known in the electronic music scene as Grand River. The 28-minute looped piece merges field recordings, spatial sound design, and musical composition to create a deep listening experience that is both meditative and urgent.
At its core are the voices of seven endangered bird species - each representing a different continent - brought together in a collective choir of resistance and warning. Their songs speak of fragility and loss, inviting reflection on the rapid disappearance of these species due to deforestation, climate change, illegal wildlife trade, hunting, urbanisation, and bushfires.
Birds play essential ecological roles as pollinators, seed dispersers, and environmental indicators. Their voices are not only beautiful, they are integral to the balance of our ecosystems. Symphony for Endangered Birds captures this vanishing soundscape and transforms it into a call to action.
Through a process of detailed composition, interweaving melody, field recordings, and electronic textures, Portioli constructs a sonic monument to these birds and their complex systems of communication. The result is a powerful meditation on interspecies coexistence and shared responsibility.
A sculptural piece by Federico Gargaglione serves as the visual counterpart to the sound installation: a slender metal structure ending in a suspended, illuminated white feather. It suggests fragility, silence, and weightless resistance - a quiet focal point around which the birds’ voices orbit.
A printed booklet accompanies the installation, featuring drawings of each bird species by artist Brandon Locher. Made with a meticulous dotting technique, the images evoke gradual disappearance, echoing the project’s theme of loss, both in the birds’ songs and their fading physical presence.
This work builds on Portioli’s ongoing artistic exploration of the natural world and its acoustic language. Her previous piece Tuning the Wind transformed wind recordings into layered musical textures, allowing nature itself to become a prepared instrument. Symphony for Endangered Birds builds on that approach by giving a unified voice to endangered species through an immersive archive of beauty, memory, and warning.
The darkened walls and minimal lighting of the exhibition space are designed to heighten the sense of desperation in the birds plight and underscore the finality of their possible extinction. The installation invites deep listening and positions sound as a bridge uniting ecology and humanity’s collective responsibility to the natural world.
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
August 15 - September 28
Exhibition opening Friday, August 15
6:30 - 9:30 pm
Aimée Portioli is a Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer who records and performs as Grand River.
Portioli makes experimental electronic music with rich emotional colours. Her work, influenced by minimalism and ambient music, is atmospheric yet rhythmically complex, incorporating a wide range of contemporary compositional and production techniques.
The name Grand River evokes nature, scale, and movement, all key forces in Portioli’s work. Her first release as Grand River was 2017’s Crescente, which was named by XLR8R as one of the best releases of the year. She followed this with her debut album Pineapple (Spazio Disponibile, 2018), which garnered praise from The Quietus among others, while its follow-up Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes (Editions Mego, 2020) was positively received by Resident Advisor and The Verge, and was elected among best albums of 2020 by Inverted Audio.
Her work has separately appeared on compilations by Ghostly International, Tresor, and Longform Editions.
In 2023, her third album All Above, found its way back to shelves under Editions Mego. Then, in 2024, the new collaborative effort In uno spazio immenso emerged, a joint venture with Abul Mogard, debuted on Caterina Barbieri's light-years label.
In addition to her studio albums, Portioli also creates original sound art installations and worked with 4D spatial sound on several occasions. In 2025 she released her latest album Tuning the Wind which was created as an installation piece.
Portioli has performed as Grand River at major international venues and festivals, including Barbican Hall, CTM Festival, MUTEK, Centre Pompidou, MUTEK, Kraftwerk, Funkhaus, WOS Festival, Berghain, and many more.
Since 2016 she runs the label One Instrument that invites artists to respond to a unique creative brief – to create a piece of music using just one instrument.
Aimée Portioli holds a bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Linguistics and Communication of Milan. Her thesis explored the psychology of the communicative function of music in media.
Her work today is motivated by similar questions of sound and music as a form of communication that goes beyond language.