"Under threat" (2023)

Sound work.

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The soundscape I composed tries to reflect and highlight the clear threat associated with the exploration and exploitation of natural resources (oil and gas), in areas of high biological diversity and with a strong presence of indigenous communities.

 

First, I investigated the resistance of Greenlandic Innuit communities to the exploration work near the site where the sound sample was recorded. These communities oppose extractivist mining as a threat to their way of life, which in many ways depends on their ancestral relationship with their environment. When I listened to the recording assigned to me, I immediately related it to a storm or to the deployment of heavy artillery. This sound can be "read" in both ways, but what is interesting is that in my composition it is configured as an antagonist, a presence that comes to disturb the peaceful coexistence between the communities and the ocean. On the other hand, the constant sound of the drones enhances this sense of threat and uncertainty. In the composition I have also added the sound of sensors and small beeps, which try to account for the dehumanisation inherent in hypercapitalism and which is the root cause of this tragedy. I also used some personal recordings of the sound of the sea, processed with a glitch filter, to give a sense of strangeness and transformation.

 

This imminent danger approaches and surrounds the communities, which are represented acoustically through the improvised recording of the programme of a local radio station in Greenland, close to the coordinates where the assigned sound sample was recorded. In the face of all these threats, everyday speech, expressed in the recording of local radio voices, represents sanity and honesty in the face of barbarism and greed.

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This work is part of the project "Polar Sounds", a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).

 

The sound clips chosen for the project were recorded from hydrophones located in the Arctic and Antarctic seas and consist of a mixture of biotic, geophonic and anthropogenic sounds.