“Perhaps, indeed, for the time being, it is this enigmatic term ‘Chthulucene’ that is best suited to embracing the sympoiesis at work both in contemporary ecopoetics and in a world forever dying and being born again through its sedimentations and murmurations.” [1]
− Bénédicte Meillon, The Song of Matter for Disenchanting the Moderns.
Sound is a ubiquitous feature of all ecosystems, including soil. Since Rachel Carson’s influential work Silent Spring (1962), sounds have been inextricably linked to the health of an ecosystem. Soil inhabitants, including plants, invertebrates, and microbes, are capable of producing and perceiving sounds in order to interact with one another (Matsuhashi et al., 1998; Mishra et al., 2016; Jung et al., 2018), albeit at low frequencies. Indeed, despite lacking a dedicated hearing organ, biological studies examining plant responses to sound waves indicate that these highly sensitive organisms generate and respond to sonic signals from their environment.
Environmental changes have significant impacts on soils, and climate disturbances can alter the distribution of species and, consequently, interactions among organisms (Putten, 2012; Aimée et al., 2015). Sound may therefore be understood as an indicator of ecosystem health and, in turn, may itself be sensitive to the effects of climate change.
In October 2018, Dr. Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University, discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet emitted sound waves whose variations revealed evidence of climate change (Chaput et al., 2018). From underground microorganisms to the ice covering Antarctica, soils do indeed emit sounds. It is therefore up to humans to listen carefully in order to perceive these novel indicators of ecosystem dynamics and respond to them.
The soundscapes examined here through the lens of climate change are grounded in the survivance of sonic spaces (Volny, 2017). Through the concept of sympoiesis advanced by Donna Haraway, these transformations can be seen and heard as part of a new dimension of coexistence among climate, soils, microorganisms, and human beings.
As scientific data become increasingly precise and abundant regarding the planet’s climate and ecological emergency, how can one, as a sound artist-researcher, make this world of “more-than-human” data (Tsing et al., 2017) accessible and perceptible in a sensory way?
The practice of sonic-space survivance will be explored through concepts I have developed, such as “sound fossils” and “un-heard narratives” (Volny, 2017). Examples from my artistic practice will also be presented, beginning with the project Silence Begins at -425m, carried out in Jordan in 2013, and extending more recently to my collaborations with scientific teams in Antarctica and in laboratory settings.
The Practice of the Survivance of Sonic Spaces
Let us recall that survivance describes a state: that which “survives, that which remains of something […] that has disappeared.” [2] It is a condition suspended between what has taken place and is now past, and the time of a present haunted by that event. In short, it is a state that returns from the dead. Perhaps for this reason survivance often contains an idea of immortality. Do we not speak of “belief in the survivance of the soul” [3] to suggest that the soul endures beyond death?
Survivance can also be the defining characteristic of a particular era, one that persists in a state of survivance. Initially employed by art historian Aby Warburg in 1895 to define a new method for analyzing and classifying images in art history, indeed a new science of images, Nachleben der Antike, or the “survivance of Antiquity,” suggests a temporality of the image that differs from historical time, unfolding instead through returns, traces, and strata. According to Warburg, survivance is the movement through which forms and concepts migrate from one era to another.
This migration is also found in the survivance of sonic spaces, which resides in background noise and echo, as well as in the subtlety of spaces themselves. It contains traces and sonic residues that are often revealed through artistic practices. Through recordings, gestures, devices, and artistic situations, artists can indeed fix an image of survivance. The aim is never to “start from scratch” [4] but rather to open other continuities, relationships, and dialogues; to hear and listen in order to recognize what persists and haunts spaces, drawing for attentive listeners the outlines of narratives that are, at first glance, invisible and almost inaudible.
At the heart of these emerging territories, on the threshold of their own disappearance, appear what I call sound fossils. These are sonic remains or residues bearing traces not of living organisms, but of sounds that have become petrified, sedimented within the earth’s mineral body, whether in a desert of sand or a desert of ice.
These silent traces, trapped within the soil, speak of un-heard narratives. Both “without an ear” and “within the ear,” [5] these stories resonate within our memory and imagination. They recount events that have not been heard, nor expressed, events that are in principle inaudible, marginal, and often ignored.
Sound Fossils and Un-heard Narratives in Extreme Climates
The act of listening, that is, gently touching the surface of the ground in search of un-heard narratives, was first undertaken during my research in the sandy desert of the Dead Sea valley in Jordan. That same gesture gradually penetrated the layers of the Earth’s crust in the ice desert of Antarctica.
From there emerges a new understanding of living systems, of the density of the Earth and its microorganisms, through listening to the sounds emitted by soils from a non-anthropocentric perspective.
Petrified Traces in a Sand desert
Fascinated by the search for traces and markings within natural landscapes on the verge of disappearance, I traveled to Jordan in 2013 to the shores of the Dead Sea. I was searching for sound fossils left behind by a sea that had once covered the entire territory.
The Dead Sea lies within the Jordan Rift Valley, a graben that formed during the Miocene epoch. [6] As a result, the Dead Sea is situated 425 meters below sea level. Despite its name, it continues to disappear. Its water level is declining primarily because of intensive mineral extraction and the diversion of rainfall runoff and water from the Jordan River.
Bassam Halaibaba was my guide. I followed him through the valley to make my first recordings. Bassam quickly revealed himself to be a “vector” of the seabed. Using his sounding line, he guided me along the paths left by water in the desert (Figure 1). Walking across the floor of the vanished sea, we gathered silent sonic information about its composition and, therefore, its history.
For the installation that followed, I documented my guide’s “listening gesture” on 35 mm slides. These images served as tacit representations of sound through the bodily act of recording an un-heard narrative, visual representations of listening that are central to my practice. I then engraved the voice of the Dead Sea (Audio Excerpt 1) into the grooves of an acetate disc: a dubplate (a highly fragile acetate record cut as a single unique copy). Each time it was played, the recording deteriorated slightly, gradually weakening and revealing sounds that became increasingly faint and altered. These documents, themselves set in motion toward their own disappearance and repeating the same dance as the sea, situated the audience at the edge of silence.[7]
Crystallized Variations in an Ice Desert
After following traces buried in the sand, I turned to probing traces trapped within the ice. In collaboration with Dr. Chaput, who studies ambient noise related to climate warming in Antarctica, I sought to account for soundscapes that are constantly interacting and transforming in response to climate change.
Over a period of two years, by accelerating data collected from 34 seismographs installed across the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, an area approximately the size of France, Dr. Chaput discovered that the ice emitted sounds whose variations provided evidence of global warming (Audio Excerpt 2).
By measuring these waves, the researcher created what might be described as sonic cores, documenting the transformation of these subterranean landscapes. These records also bear witness to a disruption in the history of the soils themselves, in the tacit and millennia-old memory embedded within glacial layers.
Un-heard Narratives in the Laboratory
More recently, in collaboration with Dr. Ruth Schmidt, a microbiologist at the INRS Armand-Frappier Institute, I have engaged with the subtle presence of plants and microorganisms in soil under conditions of climate change.
By combining experiences of sound environments and artistic strategies with scientific protocols and research on the impact of variations in water availability on plants and their associated microorganisms (that is, the plant holobiont),[8] Dr. Schmidt and I sought to move away from an anthropocentric perspective that treats plants and other living organisms as objects. From the outset, we adopted a holistic view of ecosystems as interacting entities (Grey, 1993).
In a search for un-heard sounds within this subterranean world, our art-science protocol involved the use of chemical and acoustic probing techniques to investigate possible interactions among multiple senses in plants and microbes (Volny and Schmidt, 2020). An experimental sound-diffusion system incorporating a rhizotron (an underground laboratory designed to study plants and their interactions through gases and sound) was combined with the collection of gases emitted by microorganisms (Figure 2). Observations of changes in behavior and communication within the soil were then subjected to simulated climatic variations.
Echoing Haraway’s notion of “speculative fabulation,” this protocol, grounded in speculation, brought our respective knowledge and experiences into dialogue. New pathways of inquiry and listening emerged through the process, both for Dr. Schmidt and for myself.
Beyond simple storytelling, my recent collaborations with researchers in biology and Earth sciences have bridged the arts and environmental sciences in order to envision a practice in which concerns for the environment can converge and resonate.
Through the scientific data I collect, I experiment and interact. I listen to changing soundscapes that bear witness to climate disruption. I “make with.” This “sympoiesis-making with” [9] lies at the heart of my research on aural landscapes. It unfolds through “composite figures” [10] such as the sound fossils and un-heard narratives I create, which gradually take shape through my studies in Jordan, Antarctica, and laboratory environments, through photographs, sound recordings, installations, and experimental protocols.
Because many scientific questions currently remain unanswered, an ecology of listening and survival makes it possible to approach new landscapes and bring into dialogue perspectives whose subjectivities and narratives differ, while continually informing and influencing one another. It is crucial that the contemporary emergencies threatening the environment, and soils in particular, give rise to new narratives, narratives that have until now remained un-heard.
Notes
[1] Bénédicte Meillon, “Le chant de la matière pour désensorceler les modernes” [online], Transtext(e)s Transcultures, no. 13, 2018. DOI: undefined
[2] Josette Rey-Debove and Alain Rey (eds.), “Survivance,” Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, Paris, 2017.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Florence Caeymaex, Habiter le trouble avec Donna Haraway, Dehors, 2019, p. 71.
[5] The Latin prefix in- carries a dual meaning: “without” and “within” (Dictionary of the French Academy). The etymology and history of the adjective inouï (“un-heard”), although now more commonly used as a synonym for extraordinary, derives from ouï, the past participle of the verb ouïr (“to hear”), where in- functions as the privative prefix meaning “without.” It signifies “that which has not been heard, unprecedented, unheard-of” (Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales). I use the hyphen here to distinguish it from its more common meaning.
[6] Between 24 and 5 million years ago.
[7] The documents were compiled into a catalogue: Sandra Volny, Silence Starts at -425 m [artist’s catalogue], Braunschweig: Hochschule für Bildende Künste, 2013.
[8] A plant’s microbiome, namely the microbes associated with it, plays an important role in its survival: it protects the plant through cooperative and competitive interactions, while the plant provides nutrients to the associated microbes.
[9] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 5.
[10] Id., cited in Christian Indermuhle, “Manifestes cybernétiques: Donna Haraway, les cyborgs et les espèces de compagnie,” Lignes, no. 40, 2013, p. 116; https://www.cairn.info/revue-lignes-2013-1-page-116.htm#
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Auteure
Sandra Volnyis an artist-researcher and the founder of Sound and Space Research. She recently completed a PhD in Art Science and Aesthetics at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her work has been presented, among other venues, at the Université de Montréal Exhibition Centre (2019), Galerie Michel Journiac (France, 2017), the Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture (Greece, 2017), FOFA (2017), Dazibao (2016), Centre Clark (2016), and Raumlabor-267 Quartiere für zeitgenössische Kunst und Fotografie (Germany, 2013). She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Montréal studios of the Fonderie Darling through 2022 and will begin postdoctoral research funded by the FRQSC at Hexagram, UQAM/UdeM.
