Songs of the Water: listening to/through/by/from bodies of water with MAPA communities in Leicester, UK
Kaajal Modi
Songs of the Water is an artistic research collaboration between artist-researcher Kaajal Modi and the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre at the University of York, as part of a commission by Art Reach and Counterpoint Arts on the theme of Climate Justice and Displacement. The work explores the relationship between waterways, climate, migration and health through an interwoven practice of soundscape ecology and storytelling. By listening to, recording and responding to urban river/lake/reservoir ecologies, MAPA communities are invited to creatively explore multispecies entanglements of differently polluted and remediated waterways in ways that invite their own tacit (and explicit) knowledge making practices. The resulting audio soundscapes consist of oral histories and speculations about water, and underwater recordings collected using hydrophones which are "remixed" by the artist in different ways. The first soundscape, collected as part of a series of workshops over 2023-4 in Leicester, formed part of the Songs of the Water installation at Journeys Festival International in October 2024.
Songs of the Water at Journeys Festival International 2024, Soft Touch Arts, Leicester. Credit: Pete Martin Photography
Songs of the Water brings together concerns about ecosystems and community heritages, creating connections between deprived communities in the UK, and the landscape and waterways that they occupy in the present (and might have left in the past). By furnishing communities with the knowledge, facilities and equipment they need to listen to and record waterway soundscapes using DIY digital audio techniques, the project seeks to develop an archive of watery ecosystems for naturalists and scientists to learn from, and also to encourage deeper relationships between the humans and nonhumans who inhabit them. The work invites reflections on both human and non-human agency, and invites participants to think about how we might live reciprocally with other organisms (human, microbial and otherwise) with whom we share landscapes, vital resources, and even our homes and bodies.
Participants listening at the Grand Union Canal in Leicester during the Soft Touch Arts Summer School. Credit: Sunigh, Soft Touch Arts Intern
The Leicester part of the project brought together the voices of South Asian elders through storytelling about waterways, and young people at Soft Touch Arts through a summer program using hydrophonics and citizen sensing on the River Soar and Grand Union Canal in Leicester. Soft Touch Arts is a community arts organisation in Leicester who work with young people who have been excluded from mainstream education, many of whom are queer, neurodiverse and/or working class, and often themselves from migrant communities. The Songs of the Water Summer School invited participants to imagine how we might differently relate to local waterway soundscape ecosystems. They were taken litter-picking along the river with the Canal and River Trust along the River Soar and Grand Union Canal in June 2024, and then led in a 'listener' building activity using the collected litter and hydrophones (underwater microphones). Participants spent a day making recordings with these along the river and then had a discussion about what it means to take responsibility for waterways (including as a person or as a citizen), and the organisms who inhabit them. The group of older women from the South Asian community were from a Single Women’s Group reunited after three decades by the artist’s mother. Initially discussions were had over WhatsApp and individually with the artist, and later there was a WhatsApp group where stories and memes were shared. The group met up in person at Watermead Park in June 2024, at a point where the river and canal once again merge, to share food, stories and songs about water, and participate in an underwater listening exercise.
Picnic with the ‘aunties’ at Watermead Park, next to the Grand Union Canal in Leicester. Credit: Kaajal Modi
Soundscape Ecology, or Acoustic Ecology, is an emerging field within landscape ecology that uses non-invasive audio monitoring technologies and techniques to understand biodiversity in landscapes and waterways. Researchers have noted that the acoustic richness of a local animal community may serve as an indicator of biodiversity that facilitates a functional ecosystem (Maeder et al, 2019). Waterway bioacoustics is an emerging field of wildlife conservation that explores the creative possibilities of accessible and non-invasive recording technologies to monitor waterway health and engage local communities in the conservation of ecosystems (Barclay et al, 2018; Greenhalgh et al, 2020). Research by the Environment Agency suggests that social impacts of proximity to poor water quality can have negative effects in terms of: the health of those coming into contact with contaminated river water; the economies associated with poor river water quality; aesthetic and nuisance impacts; and the positive benefits associated with recreational use of the river environment. They argue that while it might be difficult to establish clear and direct causal relationships between deprivation and poor water quality, anecdotal and hypothetical evidence would suggest that there is a correlation between deprived communities and polluted waterways (Damery et al, 2008).
Listening at the River Soar Viaduct during the Soft Touch Arts Summer School. Credit: Sunigh, Soft Touch Arts Intern
Although much work has been done in this area within forest landscapes and tidal/saltwater ecosystems, much less attention has been paid to freshwater ecosystems such as rivers, lakes and ponds (which are just as ecologically diverse). Rivers in the UK are in some ways cleaner than they have ever been, yet due to a lack of investment in sewage infrastructure, there has recently been a lot of sewage overspill into waterways (including rivers). That plus the restructuring of landscapes and waterways bringing goods to/from warehouses and wharfs during the industrial revolution, and the impacts of climate change due to industrialisation and other human factors, means that our rivers are increasingly changing life at every scale. The Grand Union Canal is one of the major arteries of industrial expansion, and therefore was deeply implicated in the migration of goods, services and people to the region in the 19th Century, often from as far away as South Asia and the Caribbean. The story of migration in Leicester is not new, and it is intimately tied to the stories of water. This project attempted to draw out that story, in collaboration with the people (humans and otherwise) who are part of it. Since we were in a built-up area, we mostly heard human (anthropic) sounds, We were hoping we might hear fish spawning (gravel), water beetles and underwater bugs communicating, or even bubbles that indicate microorganismal activity, and while participants didn’t report hearing these sounds, we might be able to pick them out when we listen in the studio (or using LLM processing at a later date).
Dragonfly on lilypads at the River Soar Viaduct during the Soft Touch Arts Summer School. Credit: Sunigh, Soft Touch Arts Intern
Astrida Neimanis notes that water is not simply an ecosystem, it is “a conduit and mode of connection… a planetary archive of meaning and matter” to which we return our medical and more commonplace excretions (Neimanis, 2012). The project looked to contend with the meanings that permeate these materialities: not only those of disposable culture, medicalised problem-solving, and ecological disconnect, but also those that frame issues of land and water justice, environmental racism, climate displacement and health. By inviting marginalised communities, particularly those from the Global South, to engage with and respond to these ecosystems through listening, storytelling and song, the project invited reflections on alternative multispecies cosmologies as a way to gather insights into how we might live more reciprocally with our water heritage. By working with young people from Soft Touch Arts, the project further sought to create forms of intergenerational knowledge-making and sharing between different communities who are excluded both from access to outdoor spaces, and from debates about climate change. Since the Soft Touch participants were all musicians, they were encouraged to think about the shapes of musical instruments and equipment in how they collected recordings. They considered what they could hear in the river, and how they might listen differently using the litter we had collected as underwater prosthetics that extended their bodies below the waterline. While this meant some of them were more active in how they collected the recordings, creating anthropic sounds that likely disrupted the underwater ecosystems, many others were more passive in their approach. When asked to anthropomorphise the river and reflect on how it might feel about how it had been treated by humans, many of them expressed a deep anger and frustration. This led to a discussion about how they had so little control over what had been done to the water in the past (power stations, industrial runoff) and what was happening now (sewage overspill, littering, climate change).
Participants listening at Soft Touch Arts, Leicester, Journeys Festival International 2024. Credit: Dijana Rakovic
Analysis of the recordings are still pending, but in the discussions we covered drinking, bathing, collecting water, the activities that happened along the riverside, our beliefs and understandings, and our hopes for the future. A story thread that emerged with the South Asian women was about how water connects us across time, space and even spiritual planes. There was also a material connection between the waterways of origin for many participants in South Asia and Africa through the use of irrigation to water monoculture crops, including cotton. Much of this cotton was exported from (what was then) India, as well as Uganda, and Kenya (where many of my participants and their families had lived) to warehouses and factories in the UK, and directly shaped the waterways that served them (including the Soar and Grand Union Canal). Many of the women worked in the textile industry when they arrived in the country, and formed lasting friendships and often bodily injuries due to workplace exploitation (which directly influenced their relationship with the outdoors, e.g. one of them couldn’t walk far for the listening exercise due to a factory-related knee injury). These two groups met for the first time at the Journeys Festival launch party (which the “aunties” catered, and the young people DJed), and each had a chance to listen to experience the final work in company with each other.
Songs of the Water installation at Soft Touch Arts, Leicester, Journeys Festival International 2024. Credit: Dijana Rakovic
The installation at Journey’s Festival consisted of a pond, and an audio soundscape consisting of some of these conversations and the underwater recordings made by participants interwoven with an original audio essay by the artist (becoming water). The work invited reflections on the themes of the project, and an expanded conceptualisation of health that includes the other organisms with whom we share worlds. Participants were invited to sit on the bench and contemplate the water in the pond, using headphones provided to hear the soundscape. The work ended with a watery ‘somatisation’ that was used at the beginning of each listening exercise with participants, inviting visitors to become part of the work. The protocol for the watery somatisation is included below, and readers are encouraged to use it to become part of watery bodies that are important to them in their own geographies.
The aunties listening at Soft Touch Arts, Leicester, Journeys Festival International 2024. Credit: Lakhvir Kaur
Becoming water: somatisation protocol (5-15 minutes)
For this exercise you will need a body, and a body of water. Please skip any sections relating to senses that don’t make sense for your particular body.
Approach the body of water
Take a deep breath in through your nose
and softly, quietly, whisper to yourself one thing you can feel
Breathe out through your mouth
What are two things you can taste?
Breathe in through your nose
Whispering to yourself three things you can smell
Breathe out through your mouth
Notice four things you can hear
The sound of my voice/other voices
The sound of the water gently lapping in the pond/lake or the sound of it flowing along the river/canal
The sound of it flowing along your ear canal and into your body
The sound of your body, your breath, your heartbeat, the blood flowing through your veins
Of the body of water that you are, and all the waters that made you
As you listen, try to filter out all the sounds except those of your body, and those of the water
Breathe
And as you do, become aware that your breath entangles you, the body of water that you are, with the body of water in the pond
Of the metabolic intimacy you share with the water, and all who breathe with it
Of how your body and your breath makes you part of a bigger world
A world in which humans and other organisms breathe together
And all who have breathed here, and along its course, human and otherwise
And how they are now a part of you
Breathe
Breathe
Breathe
Dr Kaajal Modi (hello@kaajalmodi.com / kaajal.modi@york.ac.uk)
Dr Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher working through creative practices to explore making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise). Using a methodology of 'multispecies co-creation' (Modi, 2024) they seek to recover climate heritages in ways that open up new speculations on how we might live more sustainably in the future. This practice incorporates listening, fermenting, cooking, storytelling and performative encounters to create lively and situated interactions between people, organisms and ecosystems. Kaajal’s practice-based PhD, Kitchen Cultures (2019–2023), explored food fermentation in collaboration with Global Majority women in their own kitchens over the COVID-19 lockdown as a negotiation of multispecies ontological politics through digital and postdigital practices of care.
Kaajal is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropocene Encounters at the Heritage for Global Challenges at the University of York. Their research at the centre explores multispecies encounters in the kitchen, lab and landscape in order to understand how humans continuously negotiate microbial imaginaries through food, medicine, spiritual and sensory modes, as well as poetry, song and storytelling. They are a commissioned artist on Counterpoint Arts and Art Reach’s Climate Justice and Displacement call, for which they produced Songs of the Water.
References
Barclay, L., Gifford, T., & Linke, S. (2018). River listening: acoustic ecology and aquatic bioacoustics in global river systems. Leonardo, 51(03), 298-299.
Begum, H., & Craig, M. (2022). Confronting injustice-Racism and the environmental emergency 1. Greenpeace, U. K.
Damery, S., Walker, G., Petts, J., & Smith, G. (2008). Addressing environmental inequalities: water quality. Environment Agency, Bristol.
Greenhalgh, J. A., Genner, M. J., Jones, G., & Desjonquères, C. (2020). The role of freshwater bioacoustics in ecological research. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 7(3), e1416.
Neimanis, A. (2012). Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water. Undutiful daughters: Mobilizing future concepts, bodies and subjectivities in feminist thought and practice, 96-115.
Maeder, M., Guo, X., Neff, F., Schneider Mathis, D. and Gossner, M.M., 2022. Temporal and spatial dynamics in soil acoustics and their relation to soil animal diversity. Plos one, 17(3), p.e0263618.
