A group of twenty people. Different backgrounds, a shared interest in sound, water and creative experimentation. Three days of discovering, trying things out and creating together.
Curiosity.
Water flows, both independently and influenced by external factors. Where does water come from? Where does it go? Where do we encounter water? It is a give and take, a constant exchange.
Equipped with hydrophones, contact microphones and electromagnetic microphones we search for sounds within this cycle. From the freshwater water source to the sewage plant. From snowfields to kelp forests. We are amazed, intrigued, disgusted, surprised. We fluctuate between discomfort and fascination. We attempt to share our auditory experience and put it into words. It is movement that we perceive. We feel vibrations with our bodies. We try to make connections, to recognize relationships. An in-between. Rhythmic beats. Invisible humming. If we cannot see, hear of feel it without the aid of technical devices, does it exist?
We think about space. How do sounds spread? Where are we in this space? Exploring perspectives. Seemingly clear boundaries between spaces. What sounds can be heard underwater and how do they travel through water? What does the transition between different aggregate states of water sound like?
We collect ideas, thoughts, sound recordings, photos and videos. These are collaged into a one-hour collective audio work, a polyphonic assemblage[1].
A collection of experiences,
a space to dive into.
[1] Tsing, A. L. (2017). The mushroom at the end of the world : on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Photos by Anders Eriksen
During these three days, we listened closely to the waters that flow in and out of Tromsø/Romsa, responding to the streams that enable our daily existence and infrastructure. The programme included soundwalks, a sound meditation, a guided tour of local wastewater treatment facilities, a reading group and an editing session.
The resulting collectively improvised audio zine was streamed live on the last day of the workshop. It will additionally be broadcast on Resonance FM’s Clear Spot and published in partnership with Radio Arctic.
Resonance FM https://www.resonancefm.com/ – broadcast on Monday 16th June 8-9pm, repeating the next morning 10-11am
Flowing, flushing, freezing, streaming: Listening at the intersection of human interference.
How do we attune to our surroundings and care for the lives in it? How do we negotiate with beings that communicate in other languages?
Through exercises in improvisation, relational listening and sounding, the 3-day workshop invites participants to develop experimental sonic assemblages through listening closely to the waters that flow in and out of Tromsø/Romsa and responding to the streams that enable our daily existence and infrastructure.
What is the memory of the water that gushes into our sinks, warms pathways, drains through tubes and gutters, shifts from icy lakes to artificial snow? How have the currents witnessed the change in life around them, the waters always already listening? And what does it take to sustain a city like Tromsø in a warming sub-arctic environment?
Thinking through the prism of water, the workshop will engage with the concept of ‘listening at the bundling of trajectories’ through intersectional methodologies and the writings of Dylan Robinson, Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Anna Tsing, Pauline Oliveros, and Susan Schuppli.
Participants will work individually and in groups with a recording device, various microphones, a vibrotactile feedback setup, and a computer with audio editing and effects processing software. Please bring your preferred headphones (with wire) as we have only a few sets available. You’ll decide whether your focus for the audio zine will be on sound collage or writing and reciting in your language(s) of choice. We’ll conduct soundwalks and visit local heating and wastewater handling facilities. The resulting sound works will be shared as a live collective broadcast on the last day at Tromsø Kunstforening.
*There are no stipends available for travel and accommodation, unfortunately. However, participation in the workshop is for free for all.
About us
In our collaborative practice creating storytelling experiences from transdisciplinary assemblages, sound artist Andreas Kühne and artist, filmmaker Polina Medvedeva engage ways of listening-with landscapes and its agents to produce a feedback of the patchwork of historical, geopolitical and socio-economic layers.
Arctic Auditories
This workshop is part of Arctic Auditories, a collaborative project engaging scholarship and methods from feminism, sound arts, human geography and applied ethnomusicology to develop strategies for understanding environmental change through sound. Focusing on water environments, the ultimate aim of the project is to deliver innovative inter-disciplinary, empowering, and democratic listening strategies to help individuals and society cultivate radical imaginations of futures beyond environmental anxiety.
Our programme includes internationally recognised artists and new, emerging artists, giving special attention to projects that are rooted in the region. We strive to collaborate with, support and give space to other local independent arts initiatives.
On 30 April 2025, Arctic Auditories organized the online workshop “Merging with Waters” together with the Environmental Humanities Research Group (UiT). The aim of this workshop was to provide information about the current research processes and invite participants to reflect critically on them. There were presentations and discussions on three working packages as well as a joint listening to our sound stream.
Although the working packages consist of individual parts, there are various connections and overlaps between them. The diverse backgrounds of the researchers in the Arctic Auditories project team enabled each member to view their own working package from new, inspiring perspectives and learn from each other.
Making these mergings visible, and audible, were the focus of this afternoon.
Mapping Arctic Waters
In the first part, Britta Sweers talked about the soundwalks conducted in collaboration with diverse groups in and around Tromsø/Romsa which serve as a basis for many further processes of the project, in particular a multi-layered detailed soundmap. The evaluation of the huge amount of qualitative data collected, ranging from interview to photographs to recordings, is still in progress.
This working package is full of interdisciplinary aspects which, as became clear in the subsequent discussion, were found to be challenging but above all highly enriching. Which methodologies and methods do we consider to be scientifically valid? Generosity, curiosity and openness to learning from the perspective of others enable us to expand our own expert knowledge.
At the same time, this working package has shown how complex listening is, but also how much we know through bodily sensory experiences. To learn from this knowledge, we need dialogue and interpretation.
Sound Archives
The second presentation focused mainly on sound maps. How can you organise sound recordings and merge them into a system that others can access? Angus Carlyle presented different formats of sound maps, and presented the various layers that informs the Arctic Auditories soundmap. In the workshop, we listened to some sound recordings made at the locations where the soundwalks had taken place.
An important aspect that was discussed is the connection between sound and text. Text itself can be a possible form of listening and sounding. Regarding the sound map – when is a textual description of a sound recording a useful guide, and when is it a limiting restriction? The question of how much textual description one wants to offer also arose during the planning and the realization of the soundwalks. The conductors were free to decide how much information they wanted to provide in advance, such as about the location or specific sounds.
Another point that was discussed is the visual representation of sound maps. A sound map is always just one possible way of representation and never displays actual reality. What do we want to convey to the listener? And what decision do we therefore make about what and how we filter, or what and how we represent it on the map?
Part of working package two is also the three-day “Experimental Audio Zine Workshop”, which will take place from 23 to 25 May 2025 at Tromsø Kunstforening in collaboration with the artists Andreas Kühne and Polina Medvedeva. The workshop is open to researchers, writers, artists, musicians, creators, students and anyone interested in storytelling, sound poetry and experimental publishing. Further information about the workshop and the sign up form can be found via this link: https://uit.no/tavla/artikkel/878919/arctic_auditories_experimental_audio_zine_works
Listening to the Soundstream
In the middle of the workshop, we immersed ourselves for a few minutes in the soundscape of Tromsø through our sound stream, which streams live from the roof of a building at the University of Tromsø. Pleasant sounds, such as birds heralding the arrival of spring, but also annoying sounds, such as an indefinable deep drone, moved us as listeners.
The stream transmits what the microphone picks up directly without any further sound manipulation. But as with the sound recordings, the stream does not reproduce reality, but rather translates the sound environment through technical processes. Every listening situation, whether listening in the physical space around us or listening to sounds from loudspeakers, is a unique bodily experience in its own way.
Online Writing League
In the last part of the workshop, Elizabeth Barron and Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen talked about the Online Writing League, which is part of working package three. In the Online Writing League, participants in two groups, one English-speaking and one Scandinavian-speaking, met digitally once a month over half a year. Based on the concept of emplacement (Barron et al., 2020) and inspired by prompts, key questions and keywords, the participants created artistic works in a wide variety of formats, from poetry to video to audio, and in various languages.
As demonstrated by the OWLs symposium the day before and the few works presented in the workshop, the intensive engagement with place, water and sound from different perspectives gave rise to an infinite variety of works that inspire further rich reflection and exchange. Based on these artistic explorations and further research on text and language, a glossary will be compiled, collecting ideas and thoughts on terms that have proven essential in all working packages throughout the project.
Connections, the focus of our workshop, emerged at various levels throughout the afternoon. Together, we were able to trace connections within the project between the individual working packages and recognize that each task is related to and influences the others. By listening together and to each other, we were able to establish connections between us that enabled a rich exchange. By listening to sound recordings and the sound stream, we were able to create connections to places, to our imaginations and to our bodies. By listening to our thoughts and perceptions, we were able to connect different water identities conceptually and think about how they are related and what role we play in this.
And what role can this project play? How can looking at climate and other environmental crises through a feminist lens and using the methods of our project lead to new, actionable changes?
Thank you to all participants for this inspiring afternoon!
Some links to resources shared by participants during the workshop:
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
