Research Networking Day 3: The Sound of Nature

Caroline Ford DeCunzo

00:00

Michelle/Min Lai

00:00

Nele Möller

00:00

Hosted by Sabine Sanio

00:00

Watch on YouTube

The final Research Networking Day session is hosted by by Sabine Sanio from UdK Universität der Künste Berlin. The sessions will be streamed live over CTM’s YouTube channel. The audience is invited to send questions via the YouTube chat. These will be discussed at the end of each module together with the presenters and host.

Playing the Field: Inheritance in Field Recording Practice

Caroline Ford DeCunzo (Mills College, Oakland, US)

When we speak of the _field_ in field recording, what do we mean? This paper is a preliminary investigation into notions of the field in the interdisciplinary study of sound, with attention to the pervasive inheritances of the »nature myth« and the nature/culture binary from 20th-century conservation biology and anthropological ethnography. From political ecologist Aletta Biersack, I understand place as the reciprocal and continuous articulation between the local and the global, forever materialising through histories and relationships, whose boundaries are made and re-made through practices and power relations. Understanding critical field recording practice (beyond questions of ownership, representation, or documentation for the sake of preserving nature’s other), mobilizes the immersive and embodied potential of sound in place’s making, a process in which we all have stakes. Through listening to field recorded works from the late 1950s to present, I highlight some of the broad narratives of nature at work in the genre and discuss their varying implications. Drawing attention to these inherited narratives serves as a first step in imagining field recording practices that reject anti-urban nostalgia, fictions of Edenic nature, and simplified stories of conservation, and instead embrace complex interdependence and the material present.

Caroline Ford DeCunzo is a first-year graduate student in the Electronic Music and Recording Media MFA program at Mills College in Oakland, California, USA. She performs under her name and as beautywork and releases her solo and collaborative work on KSX Solutions.

New Tropicalities, Ghosts in the Post Plantationocene: The Consideration of Indonesia, Magic, Apocalyptic Infrastructure and the Oil Palm

Michelle/Min Lai (artist/scholer, Berlin, DE)

With each infrastructural intervention, we are perpetuating cycles of production, consumption and trade movements. This presentations takes us to the plantation as centre, highlighting the magic that lies in the ruins, locating the ruins and introducing the worlds of ghosts and machines, and the more-than-human life that arrives with apocalyptic infrastructure. These infrastructures led to dispossession and proletarianization on a mass scale, perpetuating starvation. In the heart of the plantations, ghostly forces come to life in ways that are tainted through with strangeness – through blight, waves of invisible pathogens – that leave ghostly trails, the disappearance of particular sounds, wild life, customs. At the ruins, magic illuminates the borders between life and death.
I would like to introduce »New Tropicalities« as an auditory response, and a way of listening to the vectors of oil palm. In acknowledging the colonial origins of how oil palm plantations have since come to characterise landscapes in the tropics, and how monsters have come to take their place. The rigour of sound recordings and the metaphors of assemblages is employed to surface the violence upon the land and communities, and what cannot be captured. Sound is also used to propose pathways, ways of seeing in the post – plantationocene, in the context of the Riaus, Indonesia and the oil palm speculative futures in Singapore – for convivial living and dying amidst ecotoxicities.

Michelle/Min Lai uses site-based installations, participatory action, plants and food, to investigate and provoke thoughts about sustainability, food, and the environment. She co - founded TANAH in Singapore, a multidisciplinary collective with Huiying Ng, and Faiz bin Zohri in 2016. TANAH's collaborative practice highlights and reflects sentiments with regards to our relationship with the environment. The collective employs primarily the medium of installation and performance in its works.

The Forest Echoes Back: Receiving and Transmitting Forest Conversations Through an Ecology of Listening

Nele Möller (University of Leuven & LUCA School of Arts, BE)

This research is an investigation into how an artistic practice with sound can position itself within the current climate crisis. I explore recent scientific understandings of forests as interrelated communication networks of trees, plants, and fungi, and seek methods to translate and communicate these revelations through an artistic practice aimed at increasing awareness and care of forests and building contact to more-than-human others. The project aims to develop a radical practice of listening that is attuned to the interdependent relationships between forest ecosystems and incorporates cultural shifts away from the hierarchy of humans over ‚nature‘. Through various forms of listening, three forests and their communities will be connected to enable a polyvocal discussion.

I highlight different approaches and layers via contrasting examples from the Nyae Nyae Forest in Namibia, the Usamabara Forest in Tanzania, and the Thuringian Forest in Germany. Each is examined for the entanglements between humans and forests in the past, present, and speculative futures. I aim to find a way to build a non-hierarchical connections between these places, that moves away from the Western scientific narrative of evolution through competition.

Nele Möller is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in sound, video, performance, and radio. Her research-based practice focuses on vegetal ontology, human-plant entanglements, historical nature inscriptions, and listening practices. She completed her Master of Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg in 2020 and is currently working towards a PhD in the Arts at the University of Leuven and LUCA School of Arts Brussels. Since 2018 she is part of the collective hinterconti in Hamburg and founder of Atoomia, a flexible venue model based in Brussels/Hamburg that connects artists, musicians and theorists. Nele Möller has exhibited/performed at the Sculpture Quadrennial Riga, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Papiripar Festival, Golden Pudel Club, B.a.D. Foundation Rotterdam, and Kunstverein Schwerin, among others. She performs under the pseudonym Kimberly Clark and released records on Futura Resistenza and RDS Rec.