SONIC ARCHIVES 

My interest in sound and listening as a way of approaching fieldwork was echoed by my fascination with the sounds of non-human entities such as oceans and seas, elements that were present not only in my encounters with places and people in the fieldwork that had a connection to the oceans and seas, but also in encounters with non-human beings where the sound of the ocean and sea became an important aspect that helped me to interconnect these stories and histories in a sensory and affective way that was simultaneously reflected in my way of engaging with the stories I encountered.  Inspired by field-recording artists and ocean-sound artists such as Nick Kuepfer and  Jana Winderen, who pay close attention to maritime sound environments and small underwater animals, during the fieldwork travels between 2021 and 2022, I recorded ambient and underwater soundscapes. With approximately 50 samples from different parts of the Mediterranean, North Sea and Pacific Oceans, specifically but not exclusively from the coasts of Calais, Naples, Lidio di Ostia, Antofagasta and Valparaiso. The recordings were made using environmental recorders and hydrophones to record underwater (see ︎). I was interested in archiving these tones not only for their poetic and material quality but also for the symbolic value that the sea represents to the people of these places. For example, the Mediterranean and the English Channel often represent ongoing and recurring tragedies and dangerous journeys in the migratory narratives of the inhabitants of Tiburtina and The Dzjangal in Italy and France. Likewise, past colonial trade voyages in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are present, albeit deep down, in the narratives of Afro-Caribbean communities who want to reach northern Chile to set up informal settlements in empty areas of the Atacama Desert (Garland, 2024) (see Chapter Oceans & Places).

In turn, in my investigation of the sonorities of the oceans and seas, I came across colonial sonic archives that allude to layers of the tangled histories of The Dzjangal, Tiburtina and Los Arenales, which, digging deeper, reveal the legacy of colonial navigation between Europe and Latin America. For the sound compositions I worked on during these years as part of the multisensory aspect of this dissertation, I was mainly interested in using found tracks from the Huntley Film Archives and Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, namely fragments of the film Italia Vittoriosa (1936), which depicts Italian migration to South America and its subsequent transmission of the colonial idea of a ‘glorious Italian past’ to the South American territory, and from the film Colonial Africa (1940), featuring the paternalistic propaganda of British colonialism. In deciding to experiment with colonial archives sonically, I kept in mind the poetic idea of the ocean and sea as a guiding thread and a catalyzing track as well as a compositional and theoretical container for colonial and contemporary stories of journeys through the Mediterranean and the English Channel towards the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In my sound compositions, marine sound, ambient and underwater, conveys this poetic idea of navigating between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’ allowing me to reinterpret colonial sonic archives. I was interested in bringing these colonial soundtracks into an experimental and poetic context that differs from other sonic modalities dominated by a single narrative and colonial legacy, thus highlighting the idea that ‘sound cannot be sounding without the use of power’ (Ong 1999: 65). I consciously attune listeners to the sounds that occurred in a particular space-time, besides being careful not to reproduce a sense of violence and dominance when editing these sonic materials (Garland, 2024) (see ︎).

︎ Listen here a seascapes composition

︎ Listen here to a poetic piece on sea sounds, voice-over and colonial archivePart of the sound essay Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the 'West' and the 'South' (about the essay here).