SPLP 3: Land, Listening, and Leaving: Talking to Ame Kanngieser and Lisa E. Harris

Radio ArtEZ

In contemporary Western culture we seem to have lost an intimate connection with the land. More often than not we consider our surroundings as a passive backdrop in which humankind can take center stage: controlling the landscape, developing infrastructures, and extracting resources at will. This rather anthropocentric position has become unviable, however, as recent human-driven ecological crises – like climate change, the dramatic loss of biodiversity and large-scale destruction of habitats – are clearly indicating. If we wish to develop a more sustainable future, we urgently need to reconnect to our environment and restore a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. In the context of the project Land, studium generale commissioned the Radio ArtEZ series Sounding Places / Listening Places in which writer and music journalist Joep Christenhusz and creator of sound works, musician, writer, poet, and Deep Listener Sharon Stewart enquire how sound and listening can help us to do so.

In this third episode, Sharon Stewart converses with geographer and sound artist Ame Kanngieser, Melbourne, Australia, and vocalist, writer, composer and interdisciplinary artist, Lisa E. Harris from Houston, Texas about themes of land, ownership and sound. Do we have an intrinsic right to record our immediate soundscape? Who owns sound?

Shownotes:

The interview with Ame Kanngieser took place on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people of the East Kulin Nations. We acknowledge the traditional owners of these lands and pay our respects to elders past and present and to Country itself. Sovereignty was never ceded, resistance is ongoing.

Reading and listening

AM Kanngieser:

• Website: AM Kanngieser
• Soundwork: Eulogy for the Handfish, The Parallel Effect, 2020
• Talk: Listening to Ecocide at Sonic Acts, 2020
• Collaborative talk: Listening as Relation, an Invocation for CTM Festival: Discourse Series – Critical Modes of Listening, 2021, with Métis/otipemisiw anthropologist Zoe Todd, 2021
• Article: “From environmental case study to environmental kin study” in History and Theory, 2020
• Article: “A brief proposition toward a sonic geo-politics” in Journal of Sonic Studies, 2016
• Article: “Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Five propositions for sound” in Geohumanities, 2015
• Article: “A sonic geography of the voice: Towards an affective politics” in Progress in Human Geography, 2011

Lisa E. Harris

• Website: Lisa E. Harris
• Foundation for Contemporary Arts: Dorothea Tanning Award, Music/Sound, 2021, Lisa E. Harris
• Rising Residents: Climate in Crisis Residencies at A Studio in the Woods, 2020
• Interview: “Growth Potential: Lisa Harris Interviewed by IONE​” in BOMB magazine, 2020
• Interview: “Deep Space, Deep Listening, and EarthSeed: An Interview With Lisa E. Harris” by Betsy Huete in Glasstire, 2020
• Album: Earthseed by Nicole Mitchell and Lisa E. Harris, 2020
• Live, multimedia performance: Cry of the Third Eye, description in Glasstire, 2020
• Album: Cry of the Third Eye (From Original Soundtrack) on Spotify
• Installation Work: “Please, Have a Seat” and “Black Bodies in Space” in Objektiv, 2020
• YouTube: “You've got a Right to the Tree of Life” Lisa E. Harris, 2013
• YouTube: “Getting acquainted with Hermann, my theremin” Lisa E. Harris, 2017

They eat the Kill and then Have Cake.

(For Juneteenth in Texas, USA)

What happens to captives when captives are set free to run on captured land? Is this called Jubilee? Should not their ancestral land be restored to them and them unto It? Black people, we have made a new covenant every time our feet stand upon the Earth. We restore the captive land . She is set free to run through our captured feet. And this is just one reason why They make us to hover so The drip draws Bone from The meet.

-Li Harris

6/19/2020

Sounding Places - Listening Places was commissioned by ArtEZ Studium Generale. Interviews, texts and voice overs by Sharon Stewart and Joep Christenhusz. It is produced by Ondercast for Studium Generale ArtEZ. Studium Generale curator for this series: Catelijne de Muijnck