Among our project group, the idea of floating—immersing our more-than-human bodies of water back into the sea to experience its aqueous multiplicity unmediated—had long been a topic of conversation. Within feminist embodied phenomenology, the bodily logic of gestation aligns with ethics. Luce Irigaray, though not explicitly invoking the term “gestationality”, explores themes such as the maternal, the placental, and the intrauterine to emphasize feminine materiality as the foundation of enabling another’s existence. Similarly, the écriture féminine of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément envisions the generous, diffusive, overflowing feminine body as a challenge to phallogocentric frameworks. These thinkers draw on the amniotic waters of the maternal body to demonstrate how physical sensibility underpins ethical relationships.
Rather than reinvoking heteronormative, reprosexual biologisms, however, we sought to return to the belly of the North Atlantic waters—not as passive observers but as beings becoming-with the sea. This “watery thinking” defies binary distinctions: inside/outside, land/sea, human/nature. Water becomes the mode of thought itself: I breathe the moist air into a body shaped by waters once cycled through the Sea-Sami poet’s great-great-great-grandmother, through billions of cells, through my sweat and yours—evaporating, raining, saturating soil and rivers, merging with the ocean, mingling with the excretions of countless beings. Not to romanticize our gestational existence or bind environmental thought to preserve “nature” for human survival, but entering the waters of Romsa/Tromsø reminds us of the entanglements of oil, fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, and organic matter that constantly circulate back into algae, fish, and humans – more-than-humans.
By early October, summer’s record-breaking air and water temperatures had passed. Once 19 degrees in August, the water temperature had dropped to seven, demanding meticulous preparation. Dressed in dry suits with woolen hats and mittens, we spent an hour squashing ourselves into gear designed to keep us alive for 20 minutes in these frigid North Sea waters. Angus and Siri adjusted the sound devices to capture the underwater and aerial acoustics, while we, clad in red, black, yellow, and turquoise, ventured from the Polarmuseum into the sea. Tourists gathered at the museum’s railing, filming us. I became aware that, as a humanities scholar, I’m unaccustomed to this kind of attention, and I found it oddly seductive.
My suit became a vessel, my body soft and buoyant within.
The shoreline, a small patch left undeveloped between the museum’s exhibition space and its administration building, was littered with algae, plastics, and jellyfish. Before entering the water, I inhaled with Kati Roover “10,000 years worth of continuum in this one salty breath.” A sudden awareness of time coursed through me, energizing me momentarily. I longed to merge with the water body. Yet, as I waded in, a hole in my dry suit let the sea in early. I was wet before I was knee-deep—a poignant metaphor for the ocean’s persistence.
Once fully immersed, I felt a strong sense of belonging. The waves slapped unpredictably against my hood, recalling the sensation of being in a boat’s belly. My suit became a vessel, my body soft and buoyant within. Yet, the biting cold soon overtook the experience, creeping from the back of my head into my thoughts. It hurt but compelled me to linger, defying expectations—a sensation akin to floating during pregnancy (as described by Ami Karvonen and Maija Mustonen in Aquatic Encounters), though wilder. I wondered how it would feel in the warmer waters of June or July.
Silje eventually pointed at her watch, clearly urging me to get back on land, cautioning against the indifference cold water can bring. Reluctantly, I left the embrace of the sea. As Lucia helped peel away the dry suit, it felt like a second birth—a strange sense of connection and liberation, more profound than the act of shedding plastic layers should elicit.
What had happened?
Reflecting on the experience, guilt mingled with awe. I felt acutely aware of the privilege inherent in donning a suit to engage with the waters. Yet, I also remembered Gabriella Palermo’s reflections on the “turbulent materiality of the sea,” informed by Édouard Glissant’s notion of the abyss as tied to the Middle Passage. The ghosts of history—those presences-absences—emerged as visceral sensations, not abstractions. As Palermo writes, these absences have subjectivity, agency, and a perceptive regime that renders them de facto presences. The turbulent sea became a method to confront planetary troubles, slapping against my skin, seeping through the breaches in my protective suit, and compelling me to reckon with the troubles, spectral histories, and entangled futures it holds.
By Katrin Losleben
Further readings and resources
Bopape, D. S. (2022). Lerato laka le a phela le a phela le a phela/ My love is alive, is alive, is alive.
Glissant, É. (1990/1997). Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham: Duke University Press.
Karvonen, A. and Mustonen, M. (2024). “Floating”. In Khodyreva, A. (A) and Suoyrjö, E. (eds). Aquatic Encounters. A Glossary of Hydrofeminism. Helsinki: Rooftop Press, 104-111.
Neimanis, A. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474275415.
Palermo, G. (2022). Ghosts from the Abyss: The Imagination Worlds in the sea-narratives of Afrofuturism. Lo Squaderno, 17(2), 39–42.
Roover, K. (2024). “Saltwater”. In Khodyreva, A. (A) and Suoyrjö, E. (eds). Aquatic Encounters. A Glossary of Hydrofeminism. Helsinki: Rooftop Press, 248-257
We’re entering the new year with intention and reflection, and on Feb 1-2, we are gathering all our participants, guides, friends, and colleagues to join us for our Tiny Conference.
Each project member will give a short presentation on their contribution to Arctic Auditories in their respective fields and disciplines, and share some works in progress.
While this full-day event is for our consortium (all the folks from the community involved in the project) only, this blog is dedicated to documenting and informing the public of our activities. So, for those who can’t attend: among our acticities, we’ll delve into methodological discussions on the evolution of soundwalks with one of our guides, we’ll take a look at some field notes, pictures and of course, some audio-materials.
The first day will conclude with a talk from artist Margrethe Pettersen on her ongoing “Remembering with Rivers” project. The event is open to the public, free and streams on Zoom. Tickets available here.
By Elizabeth Barron, Arctic Auditories research team member.
By May 2023, we were well into Arctic Auditories. Spending all this time with colleagues focused on sound (something I have never worked on within my own scholarship) was starting to influence affect me. I was co-leading a field course in the United States for a mixed class of Norwegian and American students. The class was on conservation, sustainability, and environmental citizenship with a focus on national parks. After four months of mostly classroom-based learning, we took the students on a three-week trip to Yellowstone National Park, with stops at Teddy Roosevelt National Park and Grand Tetons National Park.
The students were well-bonded by the time we were in the field, and talked a lot! They were also a generally healthy, fit group of fast hikers. Some kind of combination of youthful energy and peer pressure to not fall behind meant I, being neither youthful nor willing to push myself way outside my comfort zone to keep up, was often hiking alone.
Was I alone in these mountains? Or was I [alone] along rivers, [alone] surrounded by volcanos, [alone] with microbes (Figure 1)?
Figure 1: Beehive Geyser at Yellowstone National Park. The geysers at Yellowstone are an amazingly diverse community of algae, fungi, and bacteria that live happily in the extreme heat and toxic-to-humans landscape of the active volcano that makes up the heart of Yellowstone National Park. It erupted just a few minutes after this photo was taken (May 20, 2023).
I wanted the students to slow down, to listen to their surroundings rather than each other for even a few minutes. In the classroom, I had taught them about different ways to engage in fieldwork, and other sensory geographies such as smellscapes and soundscapes. So, when we were in the Grand Tetons, after making it to the top and re-joining the group (who were all done with their lunch and exploring by the time I met them (Figure 2)), I asked everyone to spend at least 10 minutes of their return hike in silence, ideally hiking alone, listening.
Figure 2: Student peering over the cliff edge at wildlife below, Grand Tetons National Park with Jenny Lake in the background (May 21, 2023).
I set back down the trail at 2 pm. It was sunny, 22°C, and now I chose to walk alone. Thinking about my Arctic Auditories crew back in Norway, I chose to focus on watery sounds as I walked the Jenny Lake Wilderness Trail. This is what I heard – although actually, this is me deciding what words in my native language of English can come anywhere near trying to describe what I heard, which of course you can never read.
This exploration and play with language is something we will soon start focusing more on in Arctic Auditories, as we begin to build a multi-lingual glossary of sound words, sonic writing practices, and how we write ourselves into sound and place.
Sounds of water on the trail
The slap splash of my boots in a puddle on the trail
The dull roar of the big waterfalls, and slightly gentler, higher sound of rushing rapids
The gurgle plop of the lake edge, like an unassuming toddler talking in her sleep, loses out to the deafening motor roar of a passing speedboat, which when gone has left me the loud crashing waves on a built-up rock wall at the lake’s edge
The gurgle on the rock wall at the lake’s edge, of water breaking on rocks, is different than the little bubbles that pop up like friends when the waves hit submerged wood
The shush-shush of slush alternates with the slap-slap of walking across trails damp with melting snow and puddles
A gurgling brook emerging out from under a boulder and draining into the lake reminds me spring is well underway, but here in the mountains of Wyoming, USA the snow is still melting, feeding the lake for the summer to come
Like a TV cooking show host tasting their final dish and telling you how delicious it is: the smells and textures that you only hope to experience…I can only tell you my experience of water and hope that you will know something more. Perhaps you will think about the paradoxical nature of our watery words – that water on the mountain is powerful and strong – it crashes, rushes, and roars. Water on the trail is more of a nuisance – it slaps, slushes, and plops. All this water reminds me that water is change, it is almost constantly moving, and its instantiations are ephemeral. It is like sound in this way. How can we, with writing and language, convey the fluidity of the watery sounds around us? We hope you will help us think through this in the coming months.
Water hits the sides of my water bottle like irregular drumbeats, reminding me I am on the move. I am alive in this landscape with salty water running down my face, proving that I can move, I do move, and my body takes care of me as I take care of it, at my own pace.
Figure 3: The author (me!) after just arriving at the destination for our Jenny Lake Wilderness Trail Hike – a nice lake overlook you can see in Figure 2. Students relax in the background. 😉
Whenever I’m working on a project, I have a dedicated notebook on the go. I’m not precious about these as artefacts – at the end of each year, I type up and photograph any relevant pages before recycling. The images accompanying this post by @anguscarlyle are all from my 2023 Arctic Auditories notebook.
My notebooks have all kinds of functions. At their most pretentious, there are affinities with what Michael Taussig has to say about the notebook in “I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own” in a quote I’ve used often in class: “the fieldwork diary is built upon a sense of failure—a foreboding sense that the writing is always inadequate to the experience it records. Nevertheless, on rereading by its author, the diary has the potential to bring forth a shadow text that can simulate the experience that gave birth to the diary entry, not only for what is said, but more likely for what is omitted yet exists in gestures between the words. This is what Barthes called the ‘role of the Phantom, of the Shadow’”.
Though Taussig talks of the notebook’s resemblance to “a magical object in a fairytale” and suggests “the point is that a fieldworker’s diary is about experience in a field of strangeness,” I try and keep journals that are more ordinary, their details stretching (with the field itself) to include what happens here, where I live in the UK, as well as what goes on in Tromsø / Romssa and, in parallel, to extend the timeframe from the period away to hours spent preparing and reflecting. Some texts and drawing were made there, away (the two grey mountains were rendered with boot polish in the rain after a hike up a valley, the colours added later in my cabin, the written place names after I’d returned to the UK). Some texts and drawings only appeared here and later (the light blue writing on the page with the leaf include doodles made during a Teams meeting). Going through my photos and deciding which of these to print out and add to the journal can help recirculate memories (though, what was not photographed might struggle to raise a shadow).
