Episodes

  • 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
    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
    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
  • 3 | Watered | Re-Peat Moss
    May 29 2024
    Watered | Re-Peat Moss

    In this podcast, RE-PEAT collective approaches water justice through imagining the perspective of water itself, by drawing stories and definitions of bodies of water, and it’s entanglement in relation with other bodies, bogs, bugs, sundew, moss, reeds, drops, rivers, will-o’-the-wisp and us. Through collectivity, music and sounds, we follow a feminist subjectivity, watered, inspired by Astrida Neimanis’s call to “chart our politics of location in a way that recognises our diverse aqueous implications and responsibilities”.

    ~ RE-PEAT is a youth-led collective with a mission to change the narrative around peatlands across the UK and Europe - what we term a “peatland paradigm shift”. We strongly believe that peatlands are ecosystems for our times - representing both a vast existential risk and a huge potential for positive transformation, the course of which we follow depending on the actions of those alive today. We also see that these ecosystems can offer insights into a wide array of eco-societal features, including deep time, what we collectively choose to remember/forget, and how we can think beyond binaries.

    www.re-peat.earth
    www.facebook.com/repeatearth
    https://twitter.com/RePeatEarth
    www.instagram.com/RePeat.Earth/
    www.youtube.com/channel/UCY3qhzizgX3S8MFQ2fZYKrQ/featured
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    57 mins
  • 2 | River Song, Singing Rivers | Lisa Blackmore and Leonel Vásquez
    May 29 2024
    River Song, Singing Rivers | Lisa Blackmore and Leonel VásquezTo listen is to open up the channels and currents that run deep inside us, to attune ourselves to the lives that endure in polluted rivers. This podcast is an invitation to navigate the Bogotá River in Colombia through a more-than-human song created by sound artist Leonel Vásquez together with the living forces that shape the watershed’s ecosystems.Loaded with chemicals and sewage along its course, the river is largely devoid of the fish and freshwater crustaceans that for thousands of years teemed in its waters. People have turned their backs on the water body, even though it was once the centre of collective life. How might listening to the river’s song renew bonds of relation and reverence for water in dis-enchanted times? Guided by Leonel’s compositions, River Song, Singing Rivers is sonic immersion that attends to the Bogota rivers bogs, meanders, and flows as a living being worthy and in need of care.~ Lisa Blackmore is founder-director and curator of entre-ríos, exploring continuities between water bodies, human bodies, and territories. She recognizes rivers as active subjects producing aesthetic forms, transforming landscapes, and shaping memory. Lisa is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK, with a PhD and Masters in Latin American Cultural Studies. ~ Leonel Vásquez is a Colombian sound artist exploring ways of building spaces and experiences for listening as a political/aesthetic act involving non-human sonic agencies like waters, trees, and rocks. Their interests include underwater noise, geo-resonances, relational listening, and vibroacoustics of planetary well-being. They have done projects for Colombian cultural institutions and teach sound art at the University of Los Andes. ~ entre-ríos explores continuities between water bodies and human bodies, recognizing rivers as active subjects. We believe in artistic practices as catalysts for collaborative experiments connecting us to the environment and each other, creating knowledge deltas where arts, sciences, communities, and institutions meet. Like a river, we expand across spaces and times, connecting watersheds to create shared territories. We insist on the body as a means of knowledge production and creative encounters, working with hybrid interfaces and digital technologies to bring us close to water bodies. ~ Collective Werebere is interested in the pedagogy of listening as a political act, appropriating the body's sound condition, perceiving living environments, and deciphering their sounds as urgent messages for life care. They've researched resonance phenomena, resulting in an inventory of experimental amphibious lutherie objects mixed with vibration transition techniques towards the human body as a sonic organism. Their High Mountain Listening Station project is a space for contemplation, research, and well-being practices towards the body and territory of the Sumapaz Moor, serving as a base station for knowledge exchange.http://entre-rios.nethttps://entre-rios.net/rio-bogota/https://www.instagram.com/entre__rios/https://www.leonelvasquez.com/ https://entre-rios.net/user/leonel/ https://www.instagram.com/leonel_sound_artist/ https://casa-hoffmann.com/portfolio/leonel-vasquez-artbo-2022-seccion-principal/ https://www.instagram.com/eeam_werebere/
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    57 mins
  • 1| An Ear to the River ~ counterflows | Blanc Sceol
    May 29 2024
    An Ear to the River ~ counterflows | Blanc Sceol

    This podcast asks us to listen with the Channelsea River, a recovering waterway in East London, and home to London’s largest combined sewage outfall, historically discharging 16,000 million tonnes of raw sewage annually into the river. These discharges have largely stopped since the connection of the Lee tunnel in 2016, enabling the river to begin restoring itself, but it now faces a renewed assault as the new £4.5 billion ‘Tideway Tunnel’ is connected in the coming months. This massive infrastructure project will improve pollution events to London’s inner city rivers, but at great cost and against other more sustainable, lower impact options.

    The voice and field recordings bring us into contact with a slippery journey through underground pipes old and new, precarious river living, court battles, hope and uncertainty.

    This sound piece is part of an ongoing series of site specific actions with river, enacted by artist duo Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White) since, and in connection with, their part in the establishment of moorings and conservation cooperative ‘Surge Coop’ in 2018.

    Surge Cooperative is a collaborative effort to benevolently occupy the Channelsea river in London, as a place for people to live on the water, and a way to acknowledge the living systems that are already present.

    Our research as artists within and without this cooperative seeks to live with, listen with and act with this vital system, finding new ways to tackle problems of neglect and misuse whilst navigating ancient acts of parliament and institutional backwaters to advocate on behalf of this waterway.

    Our regular meetings with river are invitations to ourselves and others to gather, listen, observe and learn through a variety of containers, from workshops to walks, reading groups, deep listening, live transmissions and collaborations. These actions and activities become a sustaining stream that encourages us to flow as a river, attempting to connect bodies and organisations across geographical, social and political boundaries. We propose common actions with those connected to river or local to the area, encouraging collective efforts to listen with and celebrate its rich landscape. Through each of these actions our attempts to understand and support river grow and change as we uncover more about the forces at work, both within and without.

    ~ Blanc Sceol are an artist duo who work in the expanded field of listening, sound, and performance. They instigate participatory gatherings to foster a reciprocal relationship with ecological communities. Their work is a spiral within the space-time continuum.

    www.surge.coop

    www.blancsceol.co.uk
    instagram: @blancsceol
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    57 mins