This newly published audio paper offers an autoethnographic engagement with both glaciers and the ideas-of-glaciers through acts of listening by Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta campaign members. The campaign relies upon artistic intervention as sociolegal innovation by nominating the glacier Snæfellsjökull for Iceland’s 2024 presidential race. A founding tenet of the collective’s working method is listening as a primary strategy to become-with glacier (að jökla). Through campaign members’ application of multimodal research approaches, the audio paper will conceptualise, describe, and demonstrate how listening forms an integral component of communicating with the more-than-human to speculate on possible future worldings.
The paper goes beyond the concept of the »soundscape« as a wide and general metaphor (Ingold, 2007) seeking more meaningful and intimate relationships via sound, understood as a physical phenomenon of vibration, both audible and inaudible (Östersjö, et al., 2024). It questions the Western notion of music as a human (and) sonic practice, promoting listening as a creative act of becoming-with. The narrative and sonic structure of the audio paper is a building, layered unfolding – an ecomimicry of glacial becoming through flow, surge, thinning, thawing, recession, ablation, melt – where our prose outlines the palimpsestComparable to how palimpsests are archives for writing and revising, so too do glaciers compose and reconstitute the land. See Daughtry’s Acoustic Palimpsest. of Snæfellsjökull from its extent to its projected disappearance.
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