Sonic Acts

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Open-weather’s researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann, which we couldn’t include the first time around. They share their “origin story” while demonstrating “live” their collaborative dynamic. The poetics and materiality of radio, in its capacity to sense and to resonate at a distance, emerge as a tool for insightful alliances, as well as speculative and radical experiments, from the Feminist Antifascist Weather Front to radio mirrors.

In this podcast, Imani Jacqueline Brown tells us about her formative experience as an activist in New Orleans and in the crucible of Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. We also talk about eugenics and about how Carl Linnaeus’s philosophy during the Enlightement divided existence into parcels of private property, about oil infrastructure networks and environmental racism in Death Alley, and about apocalypse as repeated events. Along the way, Imani imagines paths to ecological reparation, ways to steward and attend to the world. She finds that it is precisely the uncultivated land at the back of the plantation that is rich with life and possibility: the seed banks of new growth.

In this podcast, artist and researcher Ameneh Solati reflects on the marshes as revolutionary landscapes in southern Iraq, the relationship between environment and resistance, and the challenges of researching a territory that remains partially inaccessible and historically underdocumented. The conversation also touches on collective spatial investigation, collaborations with activists and communities, and experimental forms of mapping that rethink the relationship between humans, water and land.

In this podcast, artist and teacher Cocky Eek dives into the conception and development of her inflatables—a delicate balance of fabric, air, and anchoring—as well as the challenges of preserving such fleeting, fragile materials and moments. Moving through mud, wind, and sand, she reflects on the ambiguous place her work occupies within fine art discourse, and speculates on how altering our sensory perception might, in fact, renew it.