RadioActive - on Water

By: Meira Asher Stephen Shiell
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  • Summary

  • RadioActive - on Water is a six episode podcast series, exploring the interactions between transmission, sound, activism and water. Each episode is created by a different artist/group of artists who engage with water politics and the politics of listening through the medium of radio. Curated by: Meira Asher and Stephen Shiell Production - Meira Asher, radioart106 Mastering - Daniel Meir Website design - Laetitiia Boulud ‘An Ear to River ~ counterflows’ by Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White) invites the audience to listen with the Channelsea river, a recovering waterway in East London and home to the city’s largest combined sewage outfall. ‘River song, singing rivers’ by Lisa Blackmore and Leonel Vásquez, navigates the Bogotá River in Colombia through a more-than-human song created in collaboration with the living forces that shape the watershed’s ecosystems. ‘Watered ’ by RE-PEAT collective approaches water justice through imagining the perspective of water nself, by drawing stories and definitions of bodies of water, and n's entanglement in relation with other bodies, bogs, bugs, sundew, moss and more. ‘Sonic Traces’ by Margarida Mendes, is a journey from the deep ocean to the Mississippi river, to expose how traces of pollution, sonic and chemical, travel through watery space impacting communities across ecosystems. ‘River Breathing’ by Carlos Monleon and Nathaniel Mann, examines the impact of irrigation systems on human and more-than-human communities through the Ebro river in Spain and its endangered clam population. ‘Liquidation’ by Meira Asher interrogates the politically engineered water crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Jordan Valley where Israel deliberately and strategically deprives Palestinian shepherd communities of access to water.~ Water and radio have similarities in how they transmit—via waves and currents—seeping through matter to cross boundaries, and traverse cultural, political and social divides. They remind us of our fragility and impermanence with their ability to shape-shift and expand. The white noise of the gushing waterfall or radio static can both elucidate auditory hallucinations. Composers such as Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros explore these phenomena in their works, inviting us to listen to water in new ways. The control of water, as a vital component of all life, creates conflict and struggle across the globe. Listening underwater was first made possible by Marie "Bobbie" Dennis Poland Fish who developed the hydrophone for the US navy, to differentiate between submarine sounds and marine life. ‘Liquidation’, uncovers the devastating effects of a restricted water supply on Palestinians, and ‘River Breathing’ considers the unequal distribution of water resources for leisure, farming and ecosystem survival. ‘Sonic Traces’ ‘River song, singing rivers’ and ‘An Ear to River ~ counterflows’ all examine the effects of neo-liberal infrastructure, contamination and colonial legacies. 'Waterbody' seeks to manifest the layers of water justice from the perspective of liquid places themselves. Listening with water can inspire and initiate action to protect our shared water systems. The air waves offer a shared space of watery resilience, a “hydro-acoustic-commons”, to add an auditory dimension to Astrida Neimanis’ term for a more embodied approach to water management. All episodes open up a sensory portal to the diverse methods being used around the world to tackle the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. The series has the potential to foster what Daniela Medina Epoch calls "aqualiteracy" - a recognition of the caring relationship with waters as living beings and an understanding of the constant dialogue between all bodies in constant exchange.RadioActive - on Water was produced with the support of the Pais council for Culture and Art, Israel.
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
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Episodes
  • 6 | Liquidation | Meira Asher

    6 | Liquidation | Meira Asher
    May 29 2024
    Liquidation | Meira Asher

    There is currently a structural water crisis in the Palestinian Occupied Jordan Valley. Not a climate or geographical water crisis, a deliberate socially and politically engineered crisis. Israel, since it invaded the West Bank in 1967, controls every public aspect of civilian life in the Jordan Valley. Israel administers two populations, the Israeli settlers and the indigenous Palestinian residents. Israel deliberately and strategically deprives Palestinian farming communities of access to fresh, clean and reliable water supplies, water that is needed for crops and herds, as well as for the Palestinian farmers and herders.

    This can mean either not permitting them to be connected to municipal water supplies, despite the Israeli settlers having such access. It also entails not permitting Palestinian people to sink new wells on their own land, and blocking their access to existing wells and springs, either by fencing off the water source or destroying pipes bringing the water to the herders and farmers. The end result is frequently that either the farmers have to pay extortionate prices to purchase water from the Palestinian authority, or if they cannot afford this option they are forced to abandon their land and way of life.

    Featuring the water truck driver, co-activists Natasha and Nitsan, shepherds community of Khalet Makhul, shepherd ‘W’, shepherds community of Hirbet Samra and Aref Daragmah.

    Translation from Arabic: Laila Abd El-RazaqIntroductory

    text: Liam Evans

    ~ Meira Asher is a composer, performer and Human Rights activist. She primarily uses the medium of Sound-art and Radio-art. Graduate of CalArts and KonCon, she was co-founder of the ‘bodylab art foundation’ with Guy Harries (2001-11) where they produced several projects including Infantry and Woman See Lot of Things. Former lecturer at Haifa university's Art School (2012-2022) and producer of the independent Radio-art show radioart106 since 2014. Her works were released on Crammed, Sub Rosa, Auditorium, Raash Records and Ultima Ratio labels. Her recent works include Antonin Artaud’s radio essay To Have Done with the Judgement of God, Sonic Voyage of Resistance for Radio Art Zone 2022, and the Catastrophe trilogy by duo Asher.Zax featuring Dave Phillips, Ensemble Musica Nova, and more.

    meiraasher.bandcamp.com
    soundcloud.com/radioart106
    instagram: @meira.asher @radioart106
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    57 mins
  • 5 | River Breathing | Carlos Monleón & Nathaniel Mann

    5 | River Breathing | Carlos Monleón & Nathaniel Mann
    May 29 2024
    River Breathing | Carlos Monleón & Nathaniel Mann Of all the anthropogenic waters - those generated as they flow through human systems - irrigation is one of the most impactful on territories and populations throughout history. The infrastructures governed by water management institutions, which ensured the fair and responsible allocation of their waters, have given way to extraction and capitalization systems. With the arrival of digital water, the possibility opens up for both generating fair allocation systems and increasing the financialization and extraction of data from those who use the water. Given the demands for transparency in water management, what situations of privacy or turbidity are fertile for riverside populations?The project examines what properties of water and what values of the populations that care for it need to be translated into these digital abstract regimes that ignore the embodied sentience of water.This ongoing work proposes currency design tools for perceptualizing the flow of water and information such as nutrients, oxygen and pollutant levels across the metabolism of diverse stakeholders of riparian ecosystem including agricultural fields, fresh water clams or riparian forests. Both human and other—than-humans are represented in river-centric governance systems. In this process, one of the chosen ways of rendering such abstract concepts of riparian metabolism into sensation is through sound. River Breathing is an immersive sound installation in which the audience can experience the breathing of the rivers Ebro, Segre and other affluents as a symphony composed of the life cycles of the various species that participate in the pulse of the river.The protagonists of the installation are a choir of naiads, or fresh water clams, which are endangered throughout the Iberian Peninsula but especially in Catalonia and Aragon due to the relentless denaturing of their habitats ,the threat of several invasive (lets call them vigourous!) species, and increasing levels of river pollution. This choir embodies and gives voice to the river, as the mythological Naiads -deities of fountains and rivers in ancient Greece- once did.The work transforms scientific models of the metabolism of the Ebro river and its affluents based on historical and real-time data available through sensors and remote sensing systems into multi-channel sound in collaboration with musicians and the help of computer scientists from the UdL (university of Lleida) and biologists from IRTA (Catalunya) and IPE (Aragón).A series of metabolic scores are produced from the data to be interpreted by musicians , the final composition is completed with underwater recordings of the clams in their conservation tanks. The installation consists of a sculptural sound system made in ceramics and other materials designed in collaboration with sound engineers. A lighting scheme completes the installation.One of the project’s aims is to make known the complexity of the life of rivers and the delicate nature of maintaining their balance as a way of establishing a relationship of proximity with them and forming emotional bonds, of care and responsibility with riparian ecosystems.~ Carlos Monleon works with a variety of processes and materials, both living and non-living, that result in sculptural and participatory artworks.These span across different levels of bodily sensation and awareness; from the microbiological to the performative and social bodies. His main line of line of work traces evolutionary processes that stem from digestion and cognition and result in the distribution of biological processes across multi-species entanglements and cybernetic metabolisms.www.carlosmonleon/riverbreathing instagram: @carlos.monleon~ Nathaniel Mann (born 1982) is an experimental composer, performer and sound designer. Oscillating between music and sound, Mann has a compositional practice that is expansive in scope and varied in form. He takes on many roles in his work, including researcher, instrument-maker, archive-digger, surround-sound designer, filmmaker, broadcaster, storyteller, producer, curator, entrepreneur, sonic-artist and folksinger. He is also one third of the experimental folk ensemble, Dead Rat Orchestra. Mann’s compositions probe history, politics and audio culture, resisting established formats and frameworks for creating music. Each work is crafted, adapted and nuanced towards its setting, fuelled by continued dialogue and collaboration with professionals and enthusiasts from varied fields. These have included filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, academics, curators, a pigeon fancier and a swordsmith. Mann has explored many subjects including the colonial residue of recorded music in South Africa, in dialogue with Andile Vellum, a deaf dancer/choreographer based in Cape Town (Cape Sound Stories, 2016); the psycho-geographic horror of England’s public execution sites (Tyburnia, 2014-17); and the deeply rooted...
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    57 mins
  • 4 | Sonic Traces | Margarida Mendes

    4 | Sonic Traces | Margarida Mendes
    May 29 2024
    Sonic Traces | Margarida Mendes

    Embarking on a journey along hydrobodies - from the deep ocean’s abyssal planes all the way through the Mississippi river, outwards into Indonesian tropical rainforests - ‘Sonic Traces’ expands on my personal inquiries and journey as an activist and researcher. It sets out to expose how the traces of pollution - be they sonic or chemical - travel through watery spaces, impacting communities across ecosystems. Taking the form of a speculative dérive, it includes field recordings, poetry, field notes, and philosophical wonders. I address research developed in the Lower Mississippi river petrochemical corridor, North Kalimantan in Borneo island, as well as introduce my practice as an activist concerned with deep sea mining and the impacts of ocean noise. I enquire how the water column is affected by chemical particles circulating through it, as new industries arise and expand from the seabed outwards towards land, tracing some of the cumulative impacts of human presence, while raising awareness into how one is embedded in wider webs of ecosystemic exchange.

    For what if one were set to understand watery systems in novel ways that reorganize how one senses and partakes in the world?

    Expanding on how traces bear witness to past actions and leave an intergenerational imprint, I explore the complex condition of partition-thinking in natural worlds, problematising human-centric ideas of containment and fixity, in otherwise fluid and interconnected spaces. By doing so, I expand on our conceptualisation of space and corporeality to introduce new perspectives on environmental thinking.

    ~ Margarida Mendes is a researcher, curator, and educator, exploring the overlap between systems thinking, experimental film, sound practices and ecopedagogy. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions and experiential works where alternative modes of education and sensory practices may catalyse political imagination and restorative action.

    goldsmiths.academia.edu/margaridamendes
    instagram: @margarida___mendes
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    57 mins

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