FRAGMENTURGY TRANSMISSIONS
What is a forest? participatory work
Murmuration #5 transmit, Glenshee, Scotland (2024)
hosted by Jez Riley French and Phoebe Riley Law
How may field recording rituals be practiced in order to re-tune ourselves ‘back to listening’, empathy, and connection with our approximate surroundings, place, fellow humans, and more-than-human beings?
While the pockets of thick, green spruce forest give the famous Cairngorm Mountain range in the Scottish Highlands its characteristic, wilderness appeal, so popular with tourist, few know that most forests in the area are heavily agricultured monocultures made up by spruce plantations, with limited biodiversity.
What is a forest? is a participatory sound work based on the listening, mapping and re-sounding of a spruce plantation located in the Glenshee area of the Scottish Highlands, performed by participants in Jez Riley French’s 5:th Murmuration series, which took place in Glenshee, 2024.
In this practical session, we closely re-explored being-with the local spruce habitat via various modes of listening, such as the fragmenturgy listening methodology, developed by Sunesson, since 2016.
Fragmenturgy explores field recording as a way of "listening-through-the machine" – a deeply personal, relational ritual where listening technologies are approached as listening filters rather than recording devices, and any possible, recorded sound fragments are collectively and carefully transmitted back in close interplay with the site.
Relevant reading
Sunesson, Jenny: “Ephiphanies of an Invisible weave” (2023). Translated by Steven Cuzner.