Requerimento Re-visited with readings from Bartholomeo de Las Casa

Sound Art Intervention

This workshop aims to address the conference themes at both collective and interpersonal levels, using artistic research strategies, particularly performance and immersive sound art. It will model live, impromptu engagement, leveraging the knowledge, positions, and questions brought by participants. It will use field recordings, voicings, and instant composition as playful approaches for creative engagement.

From early human-nature encounters to the paradox of ecological agency – using sound art and performance to explore embodied engagement with climate narratives In the global north, our relationship with the climate crisis is paradoxical: despite abundant scientific data indicating a state of concern, societal action remains diffuse and ineffective (Cologna et al., 2024; Rowland et al., 2022; Viet-Phuong et al., 2024). We are not acting on what we know. Is it because we cannot bridge lived ethics with a knowledge-based worldview? Are we telling the wrong stories, or telling them without a sense of immediate urgency? This issue, as old as time, is pressing as time runs out. The entanglement of planetary ecosystems with human and more-than-human lifeforms is held hostage by this paradox. At the same time, stories framing the relationship between humans and nature have been told since ancient times. Particularly relevant in a global north-south context are narratives of colonial encounters during late medieval and early modern times. Bartolomé de las Casas’ “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” (1542) and Olaus Magnus’ “A Description of the Northern Peoples” (1555) are two such examples. How do narratives of the human nature relationship change with history and societal concerns? Can we gain insights from them into our current ecological emergency? What role does storytelling in textual and non-textual sources play in how we understand our lived experiences? How and why should we frame this inquiry through artistic research strategies? This workshop aims to address this issue at both collective and interpersonal levels, using artistic research strategies, particularly performance and immersive sound art. It will model live, impromptu engagement, leveraging the knowledge, positions, and questions brought by participants. It will use field recordings, voicings, and instant composition as playful approaches for creative engagement. This method is informed by diverse knowledge forms beyond dominant Western science (Kimmerer, 2013), emphasizing the alignment of being with doing. Combining an ‘artistic intervention’ with a ‘skills workshop,’ this proposal creates a participatory, co-created experience. It is designed to affect participants as an artwork should—sensorially immersive, unsettling, transformative—while sharing embodied knowledge of performative, discursive, and sonic approaches that can be applied in their own fields of practice.

Authors bios:

Eduardo Abrantes (Roskilde University / Åbo Akademi University) is a Copenhagen-based educator, sound artist, and artist. He is currently engaged in independent artistic work, lecturing in Performance Design and Art and Technology at Roskilde University, collaborating with the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, and conducting postdoctoral research at the Polin Institute of Åbo Akademi University. Research focuses on the intersections between sound art and natural science, emphasising embodied, site-specific, and process-driven creative approaches.

Laura Hellsten (Åbo Akademi University) is a dancing theologian who lives on the island of Kökar (Åland Islands) with her cat Moses. She has a degree in Education and completed her doctoral work in Systematic Theology on the practices of dance in the Christian traditions of the Latin West. After this, she worked ethnographically with questions of Ethics and Science communication in a cross disciplinary project with cell biology, physics and chemistry. In that project, she also started to explore transdisciplinary research where artists are welcomed to collaborations with researchers to find transformational knowledge practices and systematic system changes.

Hellsten (project leader) and Abrantes (postdoc researcher) collaborate in the Praxis of Social Imaginaries (2023-2026) transdisciplinary research project at the Polin Institute of Åbo Akademi University in Finland. The project aims to create a platform for transdisciplinary research collaborations that simultaneously trains participants in transdisciplinary research skills while also developing methods and resources for doing transdisciplinary work. In addition to this, Praxis investigates the relationship between praxis and social imaginaries in reading medieval travel accounts while critically inquiring about histories of othering, racialisation and changes in human relations to nature. This workshop is informed by the methods and approaches developed both individually and collectively by Abrantes and Hellsten within this frame.