Ecoes #5

Magazine

€7.50

Editor in Chief: Mirna Belina
Assistant Editor: Hannah Pezzack
Copy Editor: Andrea Rožić
Design: Rafaela Dražić
192 pp., 300 g, 16.5 x 23.5 cm, English, June 2023
ISSN: 2772-5685

Cycles of water whirl through this body of texts. Sometimes they are heavy with ‘toxic muck’ and sometimes as light as bubbles, crystals of ice, or the hair on coral larvae. Occasionally they will speak to a feeling, but will often address a very specific port. Most importantly, all of them are the results of artists’ experiments and artistic meandering around the topic of water.

In her visual essay, artist Annika Kappner invites you to fill a bathtub – or choose another body of water – and embark on a journey to explore your relationship with water. In conversation with Hannah Pezzack, Stefanie Hessler reflects on the 'oceanic feeling' that permeates her curatorial practice. Japanese-French artist Tomoko Sauvage speaks with Maud Seuntjens about her fascination with water clocks (clepsydras), as imagined in her installation Buloklok and other sound pieces. Meanwhile, Dutch artist Philip Vermeulen discusses his works Boem BOem, an expansive environment featuring violently bouncing tennis balls, and More Moiré, an immersive, disorienting light and sound installation, with Arie Altena.

Composer Tarek Atoui and field recordist Éric La Casa discuss listening and recording within the harbours of cities such as Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut, Istanbul, and Porto, which they visited for Atoui’s project Waters’ Witness. Three ports along the River Thames play leading roles in Jac Common and Katy Lewis Hood’s dialogic experiment. Therese Keogh delves into an offshore dumping ground of dredged material traveling from Awabakal and Worimi Country in Australia, toward the world’s largest coal export.

Alice Johnston Rougeaux takes us to the Cloud Bar – a vantage point for watching clouds in Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. In Reef Lullaby, a chapter from the book The Sounds of Life (2022), Karen Bakker mediates on the ways coral reefs listen, explaining that coral larvae are able to sense sound through hairs (cilia) that coat their tiny bodies. Lucia Dove uncovers early fifteenth-century floods in the Grote Waard, a farming region between South Holland and Brabant that was subsequently submerged. In their ongoing ice dialogue, Hannah Rowan and Anastasia (A) Khodyreva share thoughts on freezing and thawing, while the members of the Brackish Collective filter, steep, and boil their liquids, reflecting on the historical origins of cooking and the cultural significance of certain ingredients.

About Ecoes Magazine

Ecoes unpacks alternatives to the anthropocentric perspective that approaches the nonhuman as a resource. A portmanteau of ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, this periodic magazine about ‘art in the age of pollution’ showcases compelling artistic and critical perspectives that engage with the past, future or afterlives of environmental harm, toxicity, extraction, and waste.

Published with the support of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Introduction – Mirna Belina

declaration of intent – Rita Wong

AKWĀ – Annika Kappner

Stefanie Hessler: Watery Erotics, Liquidity, and Oceanic Thinking – Interview by Hannah Pezzack

★ Tomoko Sauvage: Contemplating Bubbles, the Moon, and Cycles of Water – Interview by Maud Seuntjens

(Very) Slippery Theories of Togetherness: an ice diary-dialogue – Anastasia (A) Khodyreva, Hannah Rowan

★ Drifting to the Cloud Bar – Alice Johnston Rougeaux

The Sounds of Life: Reef Lullaby — Karen Bakker

Tarek Atoui: Waters’ Witness – In conversation with Éric La Casa

flourine — Rita Wong

★ Philip Vermeulen: Sweet Spots and Altered States of Being – Interview by Arie Altena