This playlist of field recordings made in Sápmi is the result of a first fieldwork for a research-creation project, supported by the Eur ArTeC and la Canaille Productions, about the environmental noise of space and mining infrastructures.

Acousmatic infrastructures (Sápmi, Northern Sweden)

Sennheiser MKH 416 P48, Sound Devices MixPre-6. September 2023. No edit.
The satellite antennas follow regular daily cycles. At 18:30 the antenna repositioned itself, dropping the water that had accumulated in the dome. The giant machine becomes silent again... for a while.

Satellite antenna (European Space Agency station, Kiruna)

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)

Lom Uši, MixPre-6. September 2023. No edit.
It is 7am, the fog rises on the lake Vittangijärvi. Under the weight of the frost, the leaves fall by hundreds. Our stomachs gurgle, turning the sound inside-out.

Impossible silence, leaves falling from the trees (Vittangijärvi)

Sennheiser MKH 416 P48, MixPre-6. September 2023.
Recording of the noise emitted by the satellite antennas of the Esrange space center, in a radius of several hundred meters. The antennas are hidden by the forest, their movements are almost imperceptible, to the point that it is difficult to locate the source of this high-pitched and continuous noise.

Satellite antenna from afar (Esrange space center)

Lom Priezor, MixPre-6. September 2023. No edit. 
Near a reindeer pen in the Gabna Sameby, which seems to be abandoned, there is an electric gate, which blocks the access to the Malbanan Railway and the military infrastructures of Kalixfors (South-east of Kiruna), mostly abandoned today too. The recording is made exclusively with a Lom Priezor, used for listening to electromagnetic fields.

Fences, railway and cell towers – an electric archaeology

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.

Birds and warning siren (Esrange space center, Kiruna)

Jonathan Larcher