Beth Robertson, MA Sound Art (graduated 2023) from London College of Communication, was selected for the AER residency at NAHR: Nature, Art and Habitat Residency, Val Taleggio, and reports back to the Post-Grad Community.
Set up by Professor Lucy Orta UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion in 2015, The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for short residencies at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
Beth's Report
Nothing but Bark and Bone
‘Through air, I participated in a universal exchange from which my tradition cut me off. Thus, I was alone and not alone. I took part in a universal sharing. Gradually, I experienced such an involvement, and this brought me comfort, gratitude and also responsibility. I became a citizen of the world, first as an inhabitant of the earth who joined in a sharing of air.’ - (Irigaray, 2016).
My original proposal for the NAHR residency, with this years theme being air, was an activist exploration of the detrimental effects pollution has on the more-than-human soundscapes in Val Taleggio. As noise pollutes the air, the minute details in our hearing that would allow us to pick up on the smaller sounds in our ecosystem are being damaged and the quieter voices of our complex ecosystems are being silenced. Val Taleggio was not untouched by these global shifts in our soundscapes, the presence of cars and planes still polluted the air. However, the more time I spent in the mountains the more my interest shifted away from the cars and towards the concept of air itself as a passing of breath between animal and plant. I found myself re-learning from the forest what it means to be part of a symbiotic ecosystem and how we can explore these entangled identities through sound and listening.
For the first few days of the residency I would leave my recording equipment in the flat and focus on how my body responded to the environment. Throughout long walks I would listen, watch and try to be present rather than drift into thought. I walked through the mountains, stumbling onto different towns and abandoned churches. I sat by a trickling waterfall and watched an ant attempt to carry the carcass of a beetle over a twig. I slipped into the familiar drones of the grasshoppers in Pizzino and listened to the dogs howl every half an hour as the church bells chimed. I think everyone at the residency was incredibly moved by the gentle cow bell melodies always present in the air in Sottochiesa, the town we were staying in. However, the thing that struck me the most about the valley was the trees, I have never been anywhere that had such a vast ocean of tree tops in every direction. Apart from a little hay fever in the mornings I truly felt I could breathe deeply.
There were three other artists at the two week ALT residency, Heloise, Sarah and Remi and then Kibee and Marilyn who arrived later and continued the residency after we left. The first week was mostly spent discussing ideas, going for walks, eating delicious food and lots of cheese and drinking coffee and apéritifs. The others also worked with sound and I learned about recording insects and bats, passing around heartbeats and discovering new ways of experimenting with sound or the concept of sound.
By the end of the first week, with all the exciting possibilities, I was starting to feel slightly lost and uninspired by my negative approach to noise polluting the air. I spoke to Ilaria, my mentor at NAHR who runs the residency. She is an architect and artist living in both LA and Sottochiesa and was instrumental in sparking ideas and conversations around the process of making art in an environment and town close to her heart. Ilaria told me of a previous artist who did the residency, Patrick Jaimes, who usually takes photographs of slaughterhouses to spread awareness of the violence inflicted by the dairy and meat industry. However, when he came to do the residency he decided to take a portrait of the same cow every day even if he had to walk for miles to do it. A reminder that celebrating these inter-species relationships can motivate a desire to open up our pores, experience everything deeply and explore new ways of being based on a love for one another, rather than close ourselves off, cover our ears and crawl under the sheets overwhelmed at the ongoing deaths and disasters.
I went for another walk and this time approached each tree I passed with an expanded sense of self. Humans were born from the forest, our bodies are so deeply evolutionarily entangled in the bodies of trees. We are learning how the root networks of trees are similar to the neural networks in the human brain, transferring electrical impulses and chemical messages to different parts of the body and to other trees. Roots even store information! They remember past seasons, and grow their roots outwards in order to seek new information about the soil and about one another.
Humans are sensitive to bursts of scent that trees produce to warn others of predators because at one point for humans the health of the forest was a matter of survival. The only reason we have hands is because monkeys needed them to grasp onto branches. The air in Taleggio was a movement, passing back and forth between the CO2 I exhale and the leaves that absorb and convert it to oxygen which I then inhale, it’s one breath. I felt an overwhelming sense of becoming-tree.
I was reminded of a Luce Irigaray quote; ‘Breathing is life’s first and last gesture’. She saw the cleaning of the air she was breathing as an act of self care. To stop smoking, driving and eating meat was about cleaning her own lungs, lungs that we share with the vegetal world. My original activist stance on exploring the silencing of Taleggio’s breath due to noise pollution was replaced by a self love for the complexities of my own breath. I learned that the etymology of the word radical comes from the latin radix meaning roots. This was activism through learning about self, other and everything in between, through listening.
Sounds aren’t objects with clear boundaries or lines to distinguish self from other, its an ever shifting space that exists between things, in the moments where one thing becomes another. Therefore sound was the perfect medium to blur the boundaries between bodies. I thought about how I could vocalise the symbiotic breath in Taleggio, my vegetal self and the fleshiness of trees and began composing three pieces inspired by the connections I found most exciting.
skin
The first was skin and bark. How might it feel it to have insects that could cause me harm by burrowing into my bark or chewing on my leaves, crawl across my skin? Then how might the tender touch of a pollinator feel, a friend or lover who fights off the pests or carries my pollen?
roots
When it came to recording the sounds of roots exploring soil I wanted to weave them together with sounds of wondering thoughts, like roots exploring new spaces and ideas in order to learn about ourselves in relation to our environment and others. I chatted to Sarah and Heloise and asked them about a specific tree that they felt a connection with, it sparked movements beneath the soil.
lungs
The last piece was lungs, the one that leaned most into the sound of the symbiotic breath and perhaps what it sounds like to be cleaned or polluted by noise.
I took two cameras to the residency, one a polaroid and the other a Diana with 120 film. I’m drawn to these types of cameras as they have a softness to them, complimentary to my style of recording. Film is also sensitive to changes in the air, temperature and wind movement, so it captures elements of the environment that perhaps a digital camera would not. The photographs became a way for me to visually represent the movements and stories that existed in the sound pieces.
The challenge was to cultivate listening spaces in which the intimate sounds could be played through headphones. With help from Ilaria I chose three places where the residents could listen to the sound pieces. One was a liminal space filled with flowers between two buildings, the second an entrance to where the library was and the third beneath a tree. A fellow spider that I had come to know who always built her web across the alleyway inspired me to dangle the polaroids and QR codes in the same way to indicate a listening space. I enjoyed the polaroids and QR codes fluttering in the breeze, pushed and pulled by the transferring of breath, and listeners reaching up to catch them and scan the codes. However, signal in the valley was limited and so the QR codes often didn’t work. The residents were mostly drawn to the space beneath the tree so I decided to set up a table with my laptop and phone and have the sounds readily available through headphones.
Finally, I gathered the project into a booklet titled Nothing but Bark and Bone, with the images and text entangled in the sounds. Included was an exercise in vocalising breath by Pauline Oliveros and instructions on how to make a seed bomb in order to actively encourage the cleaning of our air and lungs through celebrating biodiversity. The residency has had a lasting effect on how I perceive air and breath and I hope that the project and the conversations between my fellow artists in NAHR will continue on as a radical approach to developing an awareness of our vegetal selves through the queerness of sound.
View the Nothing but Bark and Bone booklet
References
- Irigaray L. Through Vegetal Being.
- Oliveros P. Deep Listening.
- Wohlleben P. The Hidden Life of Trees.
With special thanks to
- UAL's Centre for Sustainable Fashon
- UAL Post-Grad Community.
- Ilaria Mazzoleni for Mentorship.
- The residents of Sottochiesa.
- My fellow NAHR ALT August artists in residence, Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, Kibee Ahn, Marilyn L.Geary, Remi Picó and Sarah Valeri.
- The Trees and Pollinators in Val Taleggio.
Related Links
- Download the Nothing but Bark and Bone booklet
- Follow Beth on Instagram
- See more of Beth's work
- Art for the Environment International Residency Programme (AER)
- NAHR: Nature, Art and Habitat Residency
- UAL Centre for Sustainable Fashion
- UAL Post-Grad Community
Art for the Environment Residency Programme
The Art for the Environment Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the opportunity to apply for a 2 to 4 week fully funded residency at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy and human rights.
Founded in 2015, internationally acclaimed artist Professor Lucy Orta, UAL Chair of Art for the Environment – Centre for Sustainable Fashion, launched the programme in partnership with international residency programmes and UAL Post-Grad Community.