Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and Director of the Aarhus University Centre for Environmental Humanities, Heather Anne Swanson describes the tightened relationships between the oceans and the British canals. These infrastructures were introduced as part of the British empire and global shipping commerce in the 17th century. Since then, the canals have not merely transformed England’s landscapes and fresh waters as they were fashioned into an effective means to transport goods; they have also become an ecological space where ocean materialities and freshwater lifeworlds merge. Swanson invites us to question "What may be noticed if we study oceans from inland areas?" – a line of research that has grounded her collaboration in Sonia Levy's film, Creatures of the Lines, presented on st_age.

By Heather Anne Swanson with Sonia Levy

Waters of Connection: Marine Transport, Introduced Organisms, and Inland Ecologies

This episode of Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations features the artist and STARTS resident Sonia Levy in conversation with Erika Balsom, a London-based scholar and critic working on cinema, art, and their intersection. During their STARTS residency, Sonia Levy and her collaborators, environmental anthropologist Heather Swanson, ecologist Meredith Root Bernstein, and landscape architect Alexandra Arènes, looked at the Venetian Lagoon through the lens of nature-based solutions to mitigate flood risks. What issues arise from Venice’s long history of taming its waterscape? With a shared commitment to noticing more-than-human worlds, the group strived to forge their own understanding of the controversies arising from the lagoon’s water management.

In Sonia’s eyes, lagoons are fascinating places to think about the meeting of different bodies of water - fresh and saltwater. Filming underwater became a way to get to know the ephemeral world of the lagoon and its processes of transformation in the hope that this submerged perspective might also bring about speculative approaches to policy change.

Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations is produced by TBA21–Academy with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission.

Special thanks to our guests: Erika Balsom and Sonia Levy.

Editor at large: María Montero Sierra	
Sound edited by: Elena Zieser
Introduction and credits voice-over: Nathan Johnson
Music by horizonsnd
Underwater sound recordings of the Venetian Lagoon by Sonia Levy and Jez Riley French

Produced by: Miriam Calabrese, María Montero Sierra, Katarina Rakušček, and the artists.

Hear more episodes at ocean-archive.org or subscribe with your podcast provider.

Magical Fresh & Salty Conversation: More-than-Human Underwater Filming

Sennheiser MKH 416 P48, Sound Devices MixPre-6. September 2023. No edit.
Recording made in the middle of a peat bog, listening to birds at the edge of the forest. The recording is suddenly interrupted by the warning siren from the Esrange Space Centre, as the bog is only a few kilometers from Zone A - the zone constitutes an impact area for sounding rockets launched from Esrange, 40 kilometres, east of Kiruna.

Birds and warning siren (Esrange space center, Kiruna)

Écouter, c’est toujours un peu agrandir le monde. C’est recueillir des traces, accueillir l’inattendu, tisser des présences. Mais c’est aussi garder la mémoire des instants fugaces de ce qui bruisse, bat, résonne et se transforme.

Le 15 février à 19h, Phaune Radio ouvre encore une fenêtre sur des éclats d’ici et d’ailleurs : des battements d’ailes, des chants vibrants, des souffles et des frémissements, des lignes de forces, des mélodies éphémères et bientôt disparues.

À l’occasion des 20 ans de Sonatura, Grégoire Chauvot et Mélia Roger ont rassemblé ces instants de vie saisis par les membres de l’association. Chaque enregistrement, une empreinte sonore, un fragment de paysage vivant qui, en nous, continue d’évoluer.
Un cadeau inédit qu’ils nous font pour un bel anniversaire.
Alors, tendez l’oreille… et laissez ces mondes sonores vous traverser.

Avec des enregistrements de : Pascal Dhuicq, Olivier Pichard, Noémie Delaloye, Mélia Roger, Grégoire Chauvot, Lê Quan Ninh, Jean-Claude Gallard, Laurent Cros, Jean-Christophe Pratt, Dominique Carcreff, Denis Wagenmann, Colin Hunter, Jean-Baptiste Masson, Antoine Monségur

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Listening is always a way to expand the world a little. It means gathering traces, welcoming the unexpected, weaving presences. But it also means preserving the memory of fleeting moments—of what rustles, beats, resonates, and transforms.

On February 15 at 7 PM, Phaune Radio opens another window onto fragments from near and far: the beating of wings, vibrant songs, breaths and tremors, lines of force, ephemeral melodies soon to vanish.

To celebrate Sonatura’s 20th anniversary, Grégoire Chauvot and Mélia Roger have gathered these moments of life, captured by members of the association. Each recording is a sonic imprint, a fragment of a living landscape that continues to evolve within us.
A unique gift they offer us for a special anniversary.
So, open your ears… and let these soundscapes flow through you.

Featuring recordings by: Pascal Dhuicq, Olivier Pichard, Noémie Delaloye, Mélia Roger, Grégoire Chauvot, Lê Quan Ninh, Jean-Claude Gallard, Laurent Cros, Jean-Christophe Pratt, Dominique Carcreff, Denis Wagenmann, Colin Hunter, Jean-Baptiste Masson, Antoine Monségur

Ecoutes Vagabondes avec Sonatura



Episode in 🇬🇧
Our March 2025 International guest, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer. 

Chattopadhyay produces works for exhibition, installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, and decoloniality. His works have been widely exhibited, performed, or presented across the globe. Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in media arts history, artistic research, media theory and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of five books, including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). 

Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. 

He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), Basel, Switzerland, and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen, Norway.

https://budhaditya.org/

He will be discussing with Jonathan Larcher, anthropologist and filmmaker, lecturer at Nanterre University. 

Songs played in the episode:
- Excerpt from "elegy for Bangalore" (https://soundcloud.com/budhaditya/excerpts-elegy-for-bangalore)
- Excerpt from "The Nomadic Listener" (www.lateraladdition.org/#93)

For more information on Budhaditya Chattopadhyay's International Chair visit: www.eur-artec.fr/actualites/budhaditya-chattopadhyay-chaire-internationale/


Budhaditya Chattopadhyay with Jonathan Larcher

 96kbs version. upcoming vinyl release



join fb page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Disco-Tech-Edits/217398738301224

The Wolf  (Disco Tech Edit)

A riff by Osman Aga great Gypsy clarinet player. Electric Saz. Kaval. Drums. Pots and pans. Festival les bravos de la nuit. Pélussin France

Osman Aga

Chercher les coquillages et creuser le souvenir lointain d'un paysage familier. Cette pièce sensorielle interroge les limites de l'écoute en surface, en arpentant les lieux par le bas. À la fois bambin explorant un nouvel environnement par le jeu, et coquillage passant entre les mains, les filets et les vagues, cette exploration sonore oscille entre plusieurs mondes. Les strates sonores se confrontent ici aux strates de la récupération de la mémoire, révélant des vibrations sous-terraines, des murmures aquatiques et des jeux tendres d'enfance.

Chercher les coquillages, par Lucille Bonato et Alice Calliopée

Music made from slowed-down bike bells on the Regent's Canal in London.
Purchase mp3 here: http://iainchambers.bigcartel.com/

The Regent's Canal

Terrible tape dub

Magnetar

Magnetar (feat. Adam Deitch & Shaun Martin)

Filmmaker and anthropologist with speciality in Visual-Media #Anthropology, #mediahistory. I am an associate professor at Paris Nanterre Université, where I am the director of the master degree program "Documentary Cinema and Visual Anthropology". I received my PhD in anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and I am working on the preservation of the video archives of the political collective Promedios (Mexico) and on noise pollution in Sápmi (Sweden). Re/Posting Field recordings and all kind of noises made by film, sound and video technologies.