Land, Listening, and Leaving: Talking to Ame Kanngieser and Lisa E. Harris Sounding Places / Listening Places

If we wish to develop a more sustainable future, we urgently need to reconnect to our environment and restore a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. In the Radio ArtEZ podcast series Sounding Places / Listening Places writer and music journalist Joep Christenhusz and creator of sound works, writer and Deep Listener Sharon Stewart enquire how sound and listening can help us to do so.

In contemporary Western culture we seem to have lost an intimate connection with the land. More often than not we consider our surroundings as a passive backdrop in which humankind can take center stage: controlling the landscape, developing infrastructures, and extracting resources at will. This rather anthropocentric position has become unviable, however, as recent human-driven ecological crises – like climate change, the dramatic loss of biodiversity and large-scale destruction of habitats – are clearly indicating. If we wish to develop a more sustainable future, we urgently need to reconnect to our environment and restore a more reciprocal relationship with the earth.

In this third episode, Sharon Stewart converses with geographer and sound artist Ame Kanngieser, Melbourne, Australia, and vocalist, writer, composer and interdisciplinary artist, Lisa E. Harris from Houston, Texas about themes of land, ownership and sound. Do we have an intrinsic right to record our immediate soundscape? Who owns sound?