“To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.” (Karen Barad)

Entangled (xirminja nahpy benry) is a multichannel ambisonic work exploring the non-human worlds of the Amazon rainforest, giving attention to the fascinating complexity of the continuous sonic flow created by insects, birds, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, fish, plant species, soil and water during 24 hours, day and night. 

The work facilitates a profound, intense and sustained listening experience, cultivating intimate sensory encounters where affectivity is favoured over signification and representation. The listeners-participants find themselves in a space in total darkness without images or objects, situated within a three-dimensional sound field generated by an immersive audio system.

The event presents a durational composition made from several hundred hours of environmental sound materials recorded in terrestrial and flooded forest (várzea) ecosystems within the territories of the Amanã and Mamirauá reserves in the central Brazilian Amazon. The fieldwork was carried out over two months in the dry season of 2015, in collaboration with specialists and local inhabitants. 

The ecological ethos of the work goes beyond the ‘green’ frame of widespread understanding, challenging notions about ecology and nature which take the environment as something ‘exterior’ to the human and culture. This project is akin to contemporary philosophical trends that suggest a break with dominant anthropocentrism and the recognition of the agency and vitality of a multitude of entities and energies beyond the human. Furthermore, these intrinsically ecological modes of thought allow us to appreciate sounds as “things in themselves” and invite us to reconsider the ontological and relational status of the work of art itself.

Bio

PABLO SANZ is an artist, composer, recordist and researcher currently based in Spain and Northern Ireland. His body of work includes site-specific and public art projects, immersive multichannel live performances and installations, exhibitions, releases, and pieces for broadcast and headphone listening. His practice is an open-ended investigation of listening, time, space, materiality, non-human vitality and otherness, with a focus on the limits and thresholds of perception and attention.

Through a continuum of approaches, his environmental sound works explore the vibrant entanglements and creativity of human bodies, non-human creatures, energies, materials, spaces, and technologies, encouraging sensory ecological awareness. Listening becomes a political act, intended to resist dominant tendencies in contemporary societies, cultivating alternative forms of being and thinking.

+info: https://pablosanz.info/xnb-entangled/

in collaboration with:

and kind support from: