Attempts in Spectral Listening

Anastasia (A) Khodyreva in a virtual conversation with Taru Elfving and co-listeners Yvonne Billimore, Jaana Laakkonen, Anu Pasanen, Nina Vurdelja, Kari Yli-Annala – all guided by Jasmin Inkinen, a biologist at the Archipelago Research Institute who care-fully listens to and with Seili and guides others to do the same.

In early May 2023, a small group of artists and researchers momentarily retreated to the island of Seili while gently guided into the milieu by Jasmin Inkinen, a biologist at the Archipelago Research Institute and rigorously gentle facilitator of the group’s bird-listening endeavours. Dwelling in the Turku Archipelago, the island had already been a kin for some in the group and became a new invigorating acquaintance for others. The group gathered for the Spectral Listening, an event that pre-echoed the second edition of the Listening Biennial. It landed invested in listening-sensing the perpetual movement of agentially absent glaciers that carved and wrinkled the terrain of Seili. The group landed, arguing that the glaciers do not cease to carve the regional—geological, political, economic—(imaginaries of) landscapes here—even if they are not melting at the very time the Spectral Listening lands on the island. Neither do they elsewhere on the planetary scale…

The essay is co-published by the Listening Biennial and CAA here.

CAA organised the Spectral Listening retreat in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute and Anastasia (A) Khodyreva, a Turku-based researcher and writer. It served as one of the pre-echoes to the second edition of the Listening Biennial. The retreat continued the series of events How do you know what you know? Exercises in Attentiveness produced by CAA as a part of the project Spectres in Change, supported by the Kone Foundation, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and the Oskar Öflund Foundation.