Abstracts

Catherine Clover (Bio)

An Acoustic Commons of the East Atlantic Flyway

I work with listening, sound, language and the more-than-human world. The urgency of the environmental crisis calls for a different way of being and my work seeks to identify shared multispecies territories (Vinciane Despret) particularly within the urban setting. This presentation will use a recent residency in London, UK, and a group exhibition in Aarhus, Denmark to introduce the idea of an acoustic commons, a migratory acoustic commons: a sharing of sound, a sharing of voice, of visiting and hosting across species and across landscapes. This acoustic commons is a space that is potentially hosted by the voices of the birds, the passage migrants who fly the route of the East Atlantic Flyway twice a year between Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Scandinavia on their long migratory journeys.

The second half of the presentation will be a participatory voicing based on the acoustic commons. It invites the audience to suspend their mother tongues (Yang Yeung) and to consider common wild birds as complex language-users with whom we share our spaces. The voicing will be informal and playful and no skill with singing, performance or bird mimicry is needed! Written scores of the migratory birds' voices will be shared with participants and will be the basis of the voicing, which has the potential to be a means of connection through creating a polyphonic assemblage (Anna Tsing). The voicing will consist of a demonstration, warm-up exercises, a rehearsal and finally voicing the scores together.