ON CONFLUENCE is an ongoing exploration of aquatic environments through sonic, vibratory and material research. The approach considers the liminal positionality of my land based human body towards bodies of water – I sense while standing at a shore, diving a few meters, my hearing stifled, I glimpse something before it leaves my perception. A field recorder or a handful of wet clay from the riverbank becomes a tool to extend this into a slippery work at the margins. Not a work of knowing, which is a work of separation and precedes extraction but a work of sensing and attunement.
The verges of the audible, the barely heard, the remnants and noises that are in confluence in the stream, are spaces of negotiations with aquatic worlds never fully known, never fully assimilated. I learn this from a posthuman phenomenology of Astrida Neimanis and from Trinh. T. Minh-Ha’s work on the barely perceivable.

SONIC REMNANTS – TUNING INTO CONFLUENCE

Part of the intervention 'We?' at Matadero Madrid during the exhibition 'climate fitness'.
The sound based lecture performance that I presented attended hydrological currents and shared pollutants but also the currents of desire that link the site of the Matadero, with its past as a large scale slaughterhouse, to the site of the German meat production company Müller Fleisch. The re-activation of the space was based on recordings of contact microphones that enabled (sonic) access into the production facility of the german company at the riversite of the Enz. The sounds were extracted at the only point of access in the highly securitized slaughterhouse complex, a 30 meter high windowless wall. With the eye and even the bare ears, the building succeeded in obscuring its inner workings from me, but through employing the contact microphones I managed to access a ghostly soundscape consisting of eerie drones and the rhythms of logistic machinery. The only recently constructed building serves as a refrigerated warehouse facility that cools up to 9000 tonnes of meat to -25°C. It is a space devoid of humans, being operated exclusively by machines and state of the art logistic robots, that rearrange the meat on the high shelves. In its fully automated precision this is the metallic cold and razor sharp vision of the Capitalocene slaughterhouse of the 21st century. The lecture text was referencing research of Filippa Ramos that attended the history and construction of the Matadero as a 'modern and efficient' slaughterhouse, inspired by the German slaughterhouse model.