Beistet og Svermen / Rávga ja Spierru / The Beast and the Swarm

The Beast and the Swarm is a site-specific, 24-channel sound installation created for Torghuken, Tromsø city center, by Jenny Sunesson and Åsa Stjerna.
15.8.2026-31.1.2027. Curated by Tromsø kommune / Nina Mathisen and Anniken Romuld / and part of Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North /
UiT, 2021–26, RCN 325506. The sound installation runs daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The artwork evokes the migratory nature of Tromsø/Romsa through the figures of the Beast and the Swarm, which embody the cross-contaminated
waters that exist, and have existed, beneath the surface. Over the years, the harbour has served many functions and held many meanings, including as
an informal playground. Under the quay, a multi-voiced water world emerges, where the harbour’s transitory nature becomes audible through lingering
traces and the changing living conditions of Arctic aquatic creatures. Based on field recordings from the local site, the Beast emerges. Embodying its
present inhabitants, it occasionally awakens, crying out for previous populations and practices that have left the harbour but still leave traces.

The Swarm connects hundreds of red-listed, threatened, and extinct species from Arctic and North Atlantic waters, perceived as a swarm of voices.
Detached from their vital habitats, the species’ names move through the installation as a reminder of a vaster marine sensorium. Beneath the quay,
the Beast and the Swarm coexist in a shared, ever-changing sound world. The Swarm moves between single voices and dense vocal textures, while
the presence of the sea creature remains constant below the surface and, once an hour, culminates in a chorus of voices, cries, and signals.

The Beast and the Swarm has emerged through a collaboration with Tromsø Municipality, Tromsø Harbour, the various inhabitants of
Tromsø/Romsa, and the research project Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North (RCN 325506). Arctic Auditories investigates aquatic
environments and listening as pathways to knowledge about ecological change.

About Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North

The research project Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North (RCN 325506) emerged from the growing certainty that the globe is warming and that the
Arctic is the fastest-warming region on the planet.[1] The accelerating climate crisis can cause fear of the future, feelings of powerlessness, and “existential dread.”[2] The project acknowledges fear and anguish as valid reactions but seeks to develop innovative, interdisciplinary, empowering, and democratic strategies that can help individuals and society more broadly cultivate radical imaginations of futures beyond environmental anxiety.

To do so, the project questions how climate change is understood. Too often, it is considered an ecological and industrial problem requiring technocratic solutions.[3] Yet how we understand our being in the world, our relationships with other planetary beings, and the right to take, travel, and move through places are social questions that we must also ask. To ask these questions differently, the project proposes shifting perspective, thinking otherwise, and embracing fluidity.

Thinking with water

Thinking with water seems obvious when considering a place like Tromsø/Romsa, located on the Norwegian Sea. It has been, and continues to be, shaped by relationships among humans, fish, marine fauna and flora, tourism, and water-based mobility. Environment-defining features include currents and tides, weather
in the form of snow, rain, meltwater, ice, fog, and damp; lakes, waterfalls, and shorelines. Each of these features offers a point of entry for reflecting on connectivity and transformation.

Water has been operationalised as a useful tool to think-with. Astrida Neimanis has challenged us to reimagine how individual human bodies — composed of approximately 70 % water — are interwoven with the planet’s waters. Thinking with water brings forth this relationality.[4] How does our understanding of being change when we experience our human bodies as deeply intertwined with the oceans of the world? What does it mean to be intertwined with the Norwegian Sea from which this sound installation emerges — a sea that, like all oceans, is connected to different shores, different pasts, and different futures?

Thinking with water makes us aware of how bodies, places, and the planet are interconnected. Conceived in watery encounters between cells and matured in amniotic fluid, you take a first breath. Your lungs fill with moist air, containing water molecules that may once have travelled through seas crossed by earlier generations. You eat, you drink, you pee, you sweat. The liquids you emit evaporate into the air, rise, become precipitation, fall again, saturate the soil, sink deeper, meet aquifers, or run through sewage systems.

Your waters, too, move back into the ocean, where they meet the remains of billions of people and other Earth-kin, as well as oil, petrol, fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, food waste, plastics, soil, sand, gravel, or foraminifera — and may become part of algae and fish. In sustaining other lives, these beings may be caught, consumed, and incorporated into other bodies. We become with water, and with one another in water, yet we cannot count the deaths that water carries.

Nothing is new about this, but something is missing. Arctic Auditories seeks to expand how we humans, many of us privileged, think-with water about our world-entanglements. The project looks for more fluid ways of thinking that question hierarchies, binaries, distributions, structures, and systems. It invites us to think locally, corporeally, other-than-humanly, and artistically. It invites us to oscillate between foreground and background, change perspectives, leave stable certainties behind, and question boundaries between land and water, body and water, here and there, up and down. How does our understanding of a place change when we view the land from the perspective of water? [4] How does it change when, for a moment, we become silent and listen?

Research through sound and listening

Local, often marginalised knowledges about a place and its climate-related anthropogenic changes are at the centre stage of Arctic Auditories. Through participatory methodologies-inspired approaches, the project has sought to learn from knowers in Tromsø/Romsa about how they relate to this place through listening to watery sounds. Sound is understood as something perceived not only through the ears but through the whole body, through vibration. 

Over the past four years, local participants, stakeholders and researchers have conducted and participated in sound walks and sound sittings, recorded sounding locations, participated in workshops in which they created podcasts or sound- and water-related poetry, and have taken part in interviews with sound artists. The sound installation The Beast and the Swarm forms another part of the project, taking an explicitly artistic route.

As Caitlin Shepherd reminds us on her website through a quotation from Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth: “It seems that there are at least two ways of thinking of listening in terms of political action: listening together with others in order to become aware of your own conditions and listening as a willingness to change them through collective effort. The willingness can be actually missed in terms of political organizing, protesting or simply getting involved in some kind of social struggle.” [5] Together, the researchers and inhabitants of Tromsø/Romsa became aware of the sounds that were meaningful to them: that reminded them of past times and places, acknowledged what is grieved and what would be missed, and expressed what they care about. 

Building on these experiences, the exhibition invites its visitors to rethink environmental change by foregrounding artistic and bodily experience rather than numbers, data, and statistics. Instead of walking on land, the listener will walk on water. Listening invites us to create speculative narratives about how we would like to change the future that is already now.

Funding and acknowledgements

Artwork on signage by Jane Zimmermann. 

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Research Council Norway (NFR 325506) and UiT The Arctic University of Norway‘s Equality board. We are grateful
for Tromsø municipality‘s curatorship and Tromsø harbour‘s overall support for conceptualising and implementing the exhibition, Jane Zimmermann for the signage design, Superlys for the light installation, Katarzyna Dominczak for the careful translation to Northern Sami, and the administration of UiT, especially Frank-Otto Olsen for his unwavering administrative support, which made the exhibition possible. Special thanks to our earlier project members Angus Carlyle, Elizabeth Barron and Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen, to the Advisory Board, and those who have supported the project through inspiring discussions, such as Lea Stuber and Fiona Brehony. Special thanks to Jenny Sunesson and Åsa Stjerna. Our deepest gratitude goes to the research partners of Tromsø/Romsa who have joined us in the endeavour to understand a place through sound and listening.

References

[1] Rantanen, M., Karpechko, A.Y., Lipponen, A. et al. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. 
Commun Earth Environ 3, 168 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3 

[2] Green, E. 2017. “The Existential Dread of Climate Change.” Psychology Today, October 13.

[3] Ratner, B. D. 2004. “Sustainability as a Dialogue of Values: Challenges to the Sociology of Development.” Sociological Inquiry 74 (1): 50–69.

[4] Simpson, L.B. 2026. Theory of Water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead. Random House.

[5] Building on Adrienne Rich’s thought, Neimanis suggests a hydrological posthuman politics of location. See Neimanis, A. 2017. 
Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury.

[6] Thanks to Fiona Brehony for introducing us to Caitlin Shepherd’s website, where Sheperd quotes, among others, Farinati, L., and C. Firth. 2017. 
The Force of Listening. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press. See “About Caitlin Shepherd,” www.CaitlinShepherd.com, last accessed August 14, 2026.

Jenny Sunesson is a Swedish artist working at the intersection of art, research, and remix culture. Her area of specialization is the materiality
of sound, its political potential, and practices of listening, explored through
an interdisciplinary practice.

Working with sound, field recordings, interviews, and found materials, she explores how histories, ecologies, and political questions are embedded within a place. Her work often invites us to hear what is overlooked, tracing stories through the sonic fragments that remain.

For The Beast and the Swarm, your name soon the son worked with field recordings and site-based research, gathering the underwater sounds that emerge as a shape-shifting sea beast in the installation.

Sunesson has represented the Swedish sound art scene internationally on several occasions. Her work has been presented at institutions including Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Kulturhuset Stockholm, Konsthall C, Kalmar Art Museum, Uppsala Art Museum, Fylkingen, Ausland in Berlin, ISSUE Project Room in New York,
KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn, Moderna Museet Malmö, and Moderna
Museet in Stockholm.

Text by Katrin Losleben, Britta Sweers, in collaboration with Valentina Lanci (bios), and Jenny Sunesson and Åsa Stjerna (artwork description and bios)