Ecological listening in wetland forest

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

This project explores listening as a mode of ecological relation, examining how perception is conditioned and reconfigured through sustained engagement with specific environments. Across recent works, I have engaged with water-structured landscapes—from Icelandic glacial coastlines to the Amazon rainforest—each carrying distinct temporalities, densities, and ways of being. In summer 2023, I developed a site-responsive soundwalk along the Icelandic coastline, following water as it moves through glaciers, ocean, and land. I listened to meltwater slipping from ice, wind traveling across vast terrain, and tides folding into one another—encountering a landscape shaped by slow, geological time. A year later, in the Amazon rainforest, working in collaboration with members of the Kukama community, I experienced a dense and immediate environment shaped by shifting water and lived cosmologies. Seasonal floods redraw the land; reflections invert trees into roots; time becomes perceptible through the shifting sounds of birds and frogs. These experiences have informed an approach to listening as an embodied method for engaging with environmental processes—what moves, accumulates, and gradually unfolds beyond immediate perception. At Saari, this project turns toward the quieter and less immediately perceptible dynamics of wetland ecologies. It explores how perception can be activated through sustained attention, and how listening shapes the relationship between environment, body, and experience. The residency will unfold as a process-based inquiry. Through daily walking, listening, and field recording, I will gather sonic and spatial traces of the environment, developing them into a series of site-responsive sonic studies that may evolve into a sound-based work or soundwalk.