What’s the sound of climate change?

Hearing the grass grow, the drought, the flickering of a heat wave; listening to the melting of ice and the rise of sea levels. How does climate change sound? Where should I listen first, and how? Do I need suitable recording devices, or just a vivid imagination? Let us listen to a sound piece that may bring light to the dark, or rather: sound to silence – Water-Drought Patterns by Eleni-Ira Panourgia, created in 2023.

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Collective Ear is a collaboration between Brand-New-Life Magazine and Zurich University of the Arts.

Episode II is composed of fictional writing and collected fragments of conversations that took place on May 7, 2024, during The Poly Listening Club at the Zurich University of the Arts. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased (apart from the artists), may or may not be purely coincidental.

Sound piece: Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Water-Drought Patterns, 2023
Texts: Barbara Preisig
Sound design and edit: Pascal Lund-Jensen
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Kris Decker, Emma Murray, Jarina Müller Frischkopf, Barbara Preisig, Alexander Prince Osei, Maria Rebecca Sautter

Special thanks to:
Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Kris Decker, the speakers, Felix Friedrich, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, and the participating audience

Barbara Preisig

Barbara Preisig is an art historian and art critic whose research focuses on contemporary artistic practices and their social and political contexts. In exploring translocal, transdisciplinary, and nonacademic ways of writing and thinking, she addresses a range of subjects including artistic research, feminism, institutional studies, and the politics of authorship. Barbara Preisig is co-editor of Brand-New-Life.

Ronja Svaneborg

Ronja Svaneborg is a multi-disciplinary artist. Through her practice, she speculates on the voice as a bridge between self and other, blurring the distinction between individuals and their surroundings. With a focus on loneliness, polyphonic voicing and the response-ability of the collective ear, she researches attunement and resonance in interrelated listening and voicing experiences: modes of merging with the surrounding environment and participating in an orchestrated feeling of belonging.