🪴 Jachére

Exploring Human And More Than Human Relationships

Aug 23, 20248 min read

Exploring Human and More-than-Human Relationships

Multimodal Approaches, University of Bern, FS23

Outlook

…aka some thoughts made in the beginning of the course

The idea behind this project is the coming together of different water infrastructures, some human-made, some non-human-made. The small river Suze traverses the city of Biel/Bienne. At one point, a small dam, two smaller streams are forked off. I assume this was made for industrial reasons, as well as being able to control the water flow. The whole of Seeland was a giant water-mediating project, in order to gain land. The smaller stream is generally in a bad shape, highly mediated and not the prettiest thing. Further down they “renaturalized” it, in parallel to newly built apartments. Now, in the “renaturalized” part a beaver built his home, a beaver dam. The beaver’s infrastructure dammed up the water, and it was endangering the gardenish area of the new apartments. The city decided nonetheless to let the beaver where it is and install overflow-pipes, that ensure the proper flow of the water-stream. I am very interested in how these water-infrastructures come together and change their respective environments.

Waiting, hoping for a beaver to appear

…aka thoughts made before working on the final piece

At first the place pulled me in through it’s urban wilderness, in lack of a better word, unfolding from it being forgotten and unused. Seemingly nobody makes a claim to it, and the place can rest, not unlike a fallow. This wilderness is a pleasant contrast to the otherwise constantly cleaned city-space. It eminates a specific kind of tranquility, in which other-than-human can go about their ways in their own manner.

When I started to listen in I needed to relearn the place. It was an exhausting process. The once calm path became intense and teaming with sonical life. So many birds, so many industrial outlets, cars, and the unbearable loud and stinging white noise of the dam. Some thing became more present, such as the clickedyclack of passing bicycles. Or the crow colony from two blocks over. The water, once central to my visuality, almost completely vanished.

After many recording session, video- and sound-wise, I have yet to see an actual beaver. I might never see one. But, I have gotten in touch with the place, and I love that. I love to get in touch with place. It’s a mere 8 to 10 minute stretch of a walk, from dam to dam. Again and again, I am politely visiting, as outlined by Donna Haraway when talking about the practice of Vinciane Despret.

Referring both to her own practice for observing scientists and also to the practices of ethologist Thelma Rowell observing her Soay sheep, Despret affirmed “a particular epistemological position to which I am committed, one that I call a virtue: the virtue of politeness.” In every sense, Despret’s cultivation of politeness is a curious practice. She trains her whole being, not just her imagination, in Arendt’s words, “to go visiting.”

The more often I visit, the more I listen, the more stories come into presence, or layers, or threads. Birds, path, plants, felled or not, bicycles, sounds, pulled long or formed spherical, reflections in the water, all woven together. Not into a chaotic whole, but into a walkable pattern. Street, dam, path, bridge, long stretch, street, path, dam, path, street, deepening on where one is starting.

I will continue with recording and attempt to layer, or weave, the material into a listenable pattern. One that recreates my all-over-all, or summarised experience of the place through sonic and visual material.

Journal

  • 2023-05-25 Feedback from the final presentation
    • formally it was spot on,
    • my own relationship with the situation with the
    • traces are very nice
    • interspecies dam is spot on
    • human dam is very dominant in the beginning
    • texts are very heavy, but was ok in this context
    • collage, maybe montage: Christian Transcultural Montage (transspecies montage)
    • what language will i use to frame the beaver? the frames were very constructed; how to get out of the anthropocene, aesthetically
    • how can images/montage be polite; self-reflective
    • maybe be not to to self-reflective (over-interintelectualizing)
  • 2023-05-07 I watched some beaver documentaries to learn how beavers are framed in popular media. They’re mostly coined by two benefitial factors: economics and environmental. Beavers Without Borders is a good example of what I might call beaver propaganda, basically saying, just reintroduce the beaver as quick and as hard as possible.
  • 2023-04-13 Another recording session, this time in the evening, when the sun set. I feel like stalking the beaver. I concentrated on some video recordings of the traces of the beaver. I could also collect two new birds on my birder app. I entered the industrial area and filmed some of the felled trees and bushes, and also took some of the sticks and tree-shavings the beaver left with me.
  • 2023-04-06 Feedback
    • Keep the woman talking about the heron in the piece
    • Think about mapping what the beaver does, it’s infrastructures on my own work, or process
    • Concentrate on the interaction between humans and more-than-humans
    • Continue with the interview
    • Have a look at the affective agency on the beaver
    • How will I deal with the absence of the beaver? Have a look at how documentaries work: Assemblages of info-bits, leaving the arc/story to the viewer
    • Where to get a trap cam?
    • Is there any archival material on the beaver in Biel/Bienne
  • 2023-04-02 Just-sound recording session today. I did the thing where you hear what the mic hears and it was very intense. Sound as sense becomes exagerated. It’s very interesting to point the mic in all kinds of directions and control the listening like this. I haven’t listened to the recordings yet, but I’m actually looking forward to what it does to me. The enhanced soundscape produces zones of sound, that became visual in my mind. Like spheres where some sounds were prevalent and others diminuished. It also made me aware of the different layers of infrastructures, which interact with each other and can be experience differently, depending on the mode of transportation.
  • 2023-04-01 While reading John Berger’s “Why look at animals?”, the beaver got mentioned two times. The second time, that it’s one of the last visible animals with intelligence. That is sad. There could be an interesting link to topics of industrialism.
  • 2023-03-23 We could show our recordings. Some feedback I got included concentrating more on the sound recording and listening process. Two thoughts arising afterwards:
    • focus on the absence of the beaver but it’s presence through difference
    • maybe make an interview but put it in the background, passing, like some people walking by
  • 2023-03-17 Reading the two texts on Listening and the Anthropology of Sound made me accutely aware how intense these discourses were already debatted in anthropology. The latter text was mainly a collection of different aspects of the anthropology of sound and mentioned projects in each. The first was an easy accessible text on what listening actually is. Cox mentioned a project that listened into sounds of the ocean and now I want to build a DIY hydrophone. But actually I could just use my iPhone to make underwater recordings.
  • 2023-03-08 I found the paper Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology extremely tough to access. Many key parts are deeply rooted in inner discourse that I have little knowledge of. I will have to revisit my notes at some times to recall the text.
  • 2023-03-06 As a multimodal approach is dependent on technology – such as recording gear, the cloud, and algorithms – such an approach needs to be reflected upon and considered in order to not simply reproduce injustice and inequalities prevalent in that domain. A multimodal approach is no inherently democratic.
  • 2023-03-05 Second recording session, same topic. Light and wind were in favour. This time I decided not to cut anything, just recordings. I’d love to present them and talk about the idea.
  • 2023-02-26 I followed up my idea of make some recordings about the beaver dam. It was very cold and very windy. Even with a windshield, the sound was in a bad shape. The light also wasn’t the best and the image is pale.

See also

Reading Notes

Graph View

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