River Breathing
Carlos Monleón & Nathaniel Mann
This ongoing work proposes currency design tools for perceptualizing the flow of water and information such as nutrients, oxygen and pollutant levels across the metabolism of diverse stakeholders of riparian ecosystem including agricultural fields, fresh water clams or riparian forests. Both human and other—than-humans are represented in river-centric governance systems. In this process, one of the chosen ways of rendering such abstract concepts of riparian metabolism into sensation is through sound. River Breathing is an immersive sound installation in which the audience can experience the breathing of the rivers Ebro, Segre and other affluents as a symphony composed of the life cycles of the various species that participate in the pulse of the river.
The protagonists of the installation are a choir of naiads, or fresh water clams, which are endangered throughout the Iberian Peninsula but especially in Catalonia and Aragon due to the relentless denaturing of their habitats ,the threat of several invasive (lets call them vigourous!) species, and increasing levels of river pollution. This choir embodies and gives voice to the river, as the mythological Naiads -deities of fountains and rivers in ancient Greece- once did.
The work transforms scientific models of the metabolism of the Ebro river and its affluents based on historical and real-time data available through sensors and remote sensing systems into multi-channel sound in collaboration with musicians and the help of computer scientists from the UdL (university of Lleida) and biologists from IRTA (Catalunya) and IPE (Aragón).
A series of metabolic scores are produced from the data to be interpreted by musicians , the final composition is completed with underwater recordings of the clams in their conservation tanks. The installation consists of a sculptural sound system made in ceramics and other materials designed in collaboration with sound engineers. A lighting scheme completes the installation.
One of the project’s aims is to make known the complexity of the life of rivers and the delicate nature of maintaining their balance as a way of establishing a relationship of proximity with them and forming emotional bonds, of care and responsibility with riparian ecosystems.
River Breathing | Carlos Monleón & Nathaniel Mann
Of all the anthropogenic waters - those generated as they flow through human systems - irrigation is one of the most impactful on territories and populations throughout history. The infrastructures governed by water management institutions, which ensured the fair and responsible allocation of their waters, have given way to extraction and capitalization systems. With the arrival of digital water, the possibility opens up for both generating fair allocation systems and increasing the financialization and extraction of data from those who use the water. Given the demands for transparency in water management, what situations of privacy or turbidity are fertile for riverside populations?
The project examines what properties of water and what values of the populations that care for it need to be translated into these digital abstract regimes that ignore the embodied sentience of water.
ABOUT
Carlos Monleon works with a variety of processes and materials, both living and non-living, that result in sculptural and participatory artworks.These span across different levels of bodily sensation and awareness; from the microbiological to the performative and social bodies. His main line of line of work traces evolutionary processes that stem from digestion and cognition and result in the distribution of biological processes across multi-species entanglements and cybernetic metabolisms.
Nathaniel Mann (born 1982) is an experimental composer, performer and sound designer. Oscillating between music and sound, Mann has a compositional practice that is expansive in scope and varied in form. He takes on many roles in his work, including researcher, instrument-maker, archive-digger, surround-sound designer, filmmaker, broadcaster, storyteller, producer, curator, entrepreneur, sonic-artist and folksinger. He is also one third of the experimental folk ensemble, Dead Rat Orchestra.
Mann’s compositions probe history, politics and audio culture, resisting established formats and frameworks for creating music. Each work is crafted, adapted and nuanced towards its setting, fuelled by continued dialogue and collaboration with professionals and enthusiasts from varied fields. These have included filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, academics, curators, a pigeon fancier and a swordsmith.
Mann has explored many subjects including the colonial residue of recorded music in South Africa, in dialogue with Andile Vellum, a deaf dancer/choreographer based in Cape Town (Cape Sound Stories, 2016); the psycho-geographic horror of England’s public execution sites (Tyburnia, 2014-17); and the deeply rooted traditions interlinking noise and social control, creating bronze musical meat cleavers with swordsmith Neil Burridge (Rough Music, 2014). He was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award 2019, Arts Foundation Fellow 2018 and his work Pigeon Whistles (2013), a flying orchestra of flute-carrying Birmingham Roller pigeons, won the George Butterworth Prize for Composition in 2015.