Silence as a thread for listening

“Diffraction is a form of listening through friction and difference: a way of letting signals, stories, and materials bend through one another without resolving into a single account”, write the recipients of the Sound Ecologies development stipend, selected by the program jury. Spatial researcher and sound artist Nina Blume, molecular biologist Raquel Ledo Doval, artist and creative coder Denisa Půbalová, and sound artist and anthropologist Pablo Torres Gómez have collectively designed an artistic research process culminating in a live radio experiment that unfolds across the group participants’ various localities: Amsterdam, the North Sea, the Wadden Sea, and the Pacific coast of Colombia. Under the artistic guidance of sound artist Robertina Šebjanič, alongside guest contributions by Earshot, Vladan Joler, and Paula Andrea Zapata-Ramírez, the project proposal was developed in the context of the OCEAN / UNI activation series Sound Ecologies, a hands-on acoustic inquiry exploring the relationship between biodiversity, investigative listening, and ecoacoustics.

How did the idea for Diffractive Ensembles for Oceanic Listening come about? 

Diffractive Ensembles emerged through a shared interest in listening with oceans in the plural, rather than through the idea of one stable or universal “Ocean.” We became interested in silence not as absence, but as something produced when one map, one language, or one knowledge system is imposed over oceanic worlds. Inspired by questions around the map as fiction —with its biases, limits, and exclusions— and catalyzed by Vladan Joler’s input within the cohort, the process began to take shape through diffraction: a way of keeping contradictions, frictions, and partial perspectives in relation without forcing them into a single account.

How did your participation in Sound Ecologies influence your way of thinking and working together on this project?

Sound Ecologies catalyzed the encounter between our different backgrounds, locations, and relations with the ocean, turning these differences into the material through which a multisituated and transcalar listening practice began to unfold. Throughout the process, the ocean became less a defined object and more a field of relations, shaped through microbial processes, infrastructures, toxicity, metabolism, embodied memory, and silences, among others. This shifted the project away from representing oceanic environments and toward creating conditions for relation, conversation, and diffraction across them. 

Against this fluid and unstable backdrop, we became increasingly attentive to how silences are produced. Inspired by Robertina Šebjanič’s framing of sonic absence as a marker of the presence of something else, silence became a thread for listening with oceans. It also opened listening as a form of reverse forensics: not listening to what sounds, but to what creates the conditions for sound to emerge, travel, and become possible.

What role did the different disciplines you come from play in the process?

Our different backgrounds allowed the project to move across artistic research, sound practice, ecological thinking, scientific methods, situated knowledge, and speculative mapping. Rather than treating these disciplines as separate contributions, we approached them as relational and diffractive: each one bends, complicates, and transforms the others. This has been central to the project’s counter-cartographic aim: to listen with plural oceans and to trace what univocal mapping projects leave unheard.

See more about the project HERE.