PANEL:

The ocean in the Archive /

The Archive in the Ocean

Ella Finer, Vibeke Mascini & Angeliki Tzortzakaki

Silent Whale Letters is a long form correspondence project (by Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini, commissioned by Delfina Foundation and now hosted on Ocean Archive) reflecting on ‘silent whale’ – an inaudible sound recording residing in the British Library Sound Archive – and other such ‘silent’ subjects. The infrasonic blue whale voice, which is the subject of the sonic document in the archive, can only be heard if the frequencies are sped up and made audible to human hearing.

In this session, we propose a listening and reflective discussion with curator and writer Angeliki Tzortzakaki about the subjects the letters move through to critically consider the sonic archival space of the ocean, the wild oceanic space of the sound archive, and the politics and poetics of listening to more than human frequencies of relation and deep affiliation.

As the letters consider the ocean loud with communications across time and space, we want to more deeply consider in the context of this conference how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries to think not only about the movement of matter, but energies, wave-lengths, currents. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of archival practice? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history and power?

Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing and curating with a particular interest in how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge or change the order of who is allowed to occupy space. She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound.

Vibeke Mascini explores a scaling of abstract phenomena into a sensorial scope, in order to seek agency from intimacy. She proposes a conscious understanding of electric energy as a statement of interconnectedness and entanglement—between species, media and nature, matter and energy. Vibeke is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

Angeliki Tzortzakaki is a writer and curator currently based in Amsterdam. Her research investigates ecologies of self-organization, hospitality, agency, economies of knowledge production, and friendships as ongoing processes of becoming ‘otherwise.’ She has studied at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, and at the ATHENS University of Economics and Business.