Sirens - Follow the Water, Follow the Sound

«Enchanting Architecture Expanding Film» Series #2

Concept

While the sirens of ancient Greek mythology were bird-women, they were conflated with aquatic mermaids only later in history during the medieval era and were frequently associated with shipwrecks and drownings in the popular imaginary, luring sailors to their deaths, or imagined as benevolent and protective spirits of the sea. More recently, they have been reimagined as environmental guardians of the oceans, as bodies of water and fluid gender, giving voice to the impacts of the Anthropocene that manifest in marine debris, ocean deoxygenation, endocrine disruption, ecosystem collapse, multi-species extinction, and the unequal burden of environmental harm.

The city of Venice and its lagoon have become a nexus of these impacts, being particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, sinking foundations and extreme weather events. Sirens give warnings when the high tide reaches Venice. But rather than understanding sirens as harbingers of disaster, we would like to explore their potential for the artistic imagination of other life forms, creating a "sonorous cosmos" (Jane Bennett) in which we are both lost and find our place anew, or invent it.

Through a parallelism with the specific features of film experience, the song of the sirens can be transformed from attraction and warning into a vehicle of daydreaming and lucid imagination. We are especially interested in enchantment becoming a collective and polyphonic practice of experiencing space, endowed with abilities related to loss, care, and healing, and to the exploration of more-than-human relationality.

Past event

The panel discussion in Venice

For the second event in the series «Enchanting Architecture: Expanding the film experience out of the black box», the curators Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich) and Giuseppe Di Salvatore (Filmexplorer) gather artists, curators and scholars from international and local communities for a public panel discussion at Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi (2/10/2024) conceived as a polyphonic talk on sirens as guardians of the waters, on the acoustic experience of the city and the landscape, and on the imagination of a sonic pluriverse in dialogue with film. The invited guests on the panel are Ruth Baettig, Elena Biserna, Alice Jasmine Crippa, Magali Dougoud, and Pauline Julier.
The panel discussion is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the research project «Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format».

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Notes on the panel discussion

Sirens - Follow the Water, Follow the Sound

We imagined the panel discussion as a moment of informal circulation of the word, an open exchange not intended to defend theories but to explore aspects and issues of the siren as a figure of inspiration. More than a confrontation of opinions, the discussion stressed the resonance of ideas between artists, scholars, and curators. The exercise of speaking was intertwined with the exercise of listening. Artistic practices, historical information and theoretical reflections contributed to drawing a landscape of the “sirenic”, where unknown territories both attract and challenge.

On the horizon of this landscape, the recognisable profiles of the debates on the technology of fear, the surveillance society, patriarchy, queerness, hydro-feminism, environmental holism, the Anthropocene, more-than-human perspectives, interspecies commonalities stand out. The discussion was not meant to reach the horizon and sharpen these profiles though, but rather to go along the landscape and explore its unknown territories, thanks to the special vehicles of filmic and artistic experiences (part of the panel discussion was dedicated to the screening of excerpts of films, and the streaming of a collection of films accompanied the Venice event). Through such an exploration, sirens are taken seriously and genuine questions about them are raised, with the aim of not reducing them to instrumental metaphors that would serve the aforementioned debates.

This peculiar “progressive” proceeding of the panel discussion – a true meandering – makes the task of transposing it into a written text almost impossible. This is why only some indications of the ideas and references discussed in Venice can be found here. Without wanting to report the exact wording of the participants, I propose a text in the form of a fictional notebook. The notes that I gathered after listening to the audio recording of the panel discussion provided landmarks for further meanderings in the landscape of the sirenic, as well as an inspirational basis for the development of the sirenic exploration into a polyphonic book of collected essays (co-edited with Fabienne Liptay, in preparation). If the panel discussion moved from films and artistic experiences in order to explore the landscape of the sirenic, the upcoming book will depart from the sirenic imagination in order to explore the environment of expanded cinema.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore

Photos © Samuele Cherubini

These notes are personal impressions that do not correspond to the exact thoughts and words of the participants of the panel discussion: Fabienne Liptay, film scholar and co-curator of the panel discussion; Giuseppe Di Salvatore, film critic and co-curator of the panel discussion; Elena Biserna, independent researcher; Ruth Baettig, artist; Pauline Julier, artist; Magali Dougoud, artist; and Alice Jasmine Crippa, cultural producer and experience curator. Giuseppe Di Salvatore

(Giuseppe) The immaterial dimension of expanded cinema – how the filmic experience interacts with urbanscape and landscape – as a framework for the election of sirens to exemplary and inspiring figures for the connection of imagination and space.

(Fabienne) The word “enchantment” bears within itself the notion of chanting or singing. The siren’s song is a particular form of enchantment, present in the filmic and performative works of the artists on the panel, through which otherwise unarticulated issues are expressed. These include environmental harm, colonial history, marginalised or invisibilised experiences, but also imaginaries of other histories and futures. How can we expand the idea of film and film experience by way of the notion of sirenic enchantment?

(Giuseppe) Sirens are figures that, today, work as discursive hubs for relevant topics like the more-than-human perspective, interspecies connectedness, queerness, as well as environmental topics, even if their specificity is to resist quick definitions or conceptual shortcuts.

(Ruth) Ruth’s performative intervention Astrale with the sopranist Johanna Greulich is able to open the discussion insofar as it summarises several aspects of sirens: the disembodied voice of Johanna from Heidelberg to Venice; the visual connection between the source of the sound and the water of the Canale della Giudecca; the song as a re-enactment of a filmic memory, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964); Giulia (in the film) as a lost person, at the margins of civilisation and society, who dissolves into watery elements such as fog or the sea.

Ruth Baettig's installation "Astrale" - Photo © Samuele Cherubini

(Fabienne) Quoting from Maurice Blanchot’s “The Song of the Sirens”, from the beginning of his The Book to Come (1959): «Always still to come, always already past, always present in a beginning so abrupt that it cuts off your breath, and still unfurling as the return and the eternal new beginning». All the works by the artists on the panel share the notion of remembrance, but also a trajectory towards the future, the idea of transformation and becomingness.

(Pauline) In Tuvalu (reference to Pauline’s film La disparition des Aïtus, 2014), stories are like islands, and the waves feed them with sediments as much as they threaten them through the rising of the sea level. This connects Tuvalu with Venice. Venice as a laboratory for this kind of remembrance.

(Fabienne) In La disparition des Aïtus, remembrance occurs in the form of imaginative sediments that give substance, through stories, to our being lost in catastrophic situations or crises.

(Alice) Remembrance as empowerment: feeling the possibility of doing and letting emerge the capability to do. With sirens, we can connect remembrance and pro-active embodiment. This connection is the expression of a strong feeling of embeddedness in the environment.

(Pauline) Embeddedness also confronts us with paradoxes: in the experience in the Atacama desert for the filmic project Follow the Water (2023), the fact of listening to the wounds of the earth where lithium is extracted, destroying the hydric echo-system, goes together with the use of lithium in the technological devices used for filmic purposes.

Film still from Pauline Julier's Follow the Water

(Fabienne) Another occasion to have us encounter new “embedded” conceptions of the siren is their connection with “bodies of water” that are polluted with microplastics in Magali’s film Zombie Mermaids.

(Elena) The awareness of embeddedness makes us see the disturbances in natural eco-systems, that is their anthropisation.

(Giuseppe) The Greek tradition of sirens makes us attentive to the “political” distinction between the civilised polis and the outsiders. Sirens are outsiders, also in respect of rules and normality, and for this reason they are considered as a dangerous attraction. Of course, we can turn the fear of danger into a positive aspect, and think of sirens as alternative to any form of normativity.

(Alice) The element of water in sirens refers to malleability, and sirens are figures for navigating the world in an embodied way. Take the example of Chioggia and the centrality of fishermen, whose perspective can be considered as a model for a more sensitive relationship to nature/water. This is one of the political scopes of the film festival Bogiaisso, organised together with Niccolò Moronato.

(Magali) In the face of ecological disasters, like the rising of the waters, air pollution, etc., becomingness, becoming someone else, emerges almost as a necessity. In this context, it is crucial to question our relationship to water. More precisely, water can be perceived as the place to which we can return.

Magali Dougoud's performance "Zombie Mermaids"

(Ruth) Imagining water as having its own voice. In singing the voice of water, our body disappears in the fusion with water as natural element. This intuition inspired the performative intervention Astrale as a way to live the experience of a disembodied voice.

(Giuseppe) The centrality of sound can be stressed by recalling that the fish-women depictions of sirens appeared only in the Middle-Ages. Before this epoch, they were imagined as bird-women sirens, therefore clearly connected not only with the wild forest but also with the element of air, the element for sound and voice.

(Elena) In ancient times, sirens were also ugly, expressions of the unseizable subjectivity of the body. That’s why they needed to be controlled, suppressed, muted…

(Magali) …or turned into witches to be burned in fire.

(Elena) Becomingness in terms of becoming subject, becoming a political body. The sirens’ voice implies a politics of voice in the public space as a feminist thread. The siren’s voice thought of as expression of the phoné, in the sense Adriana Cavarero gave to this notion, against Western logocentrism (where the voice is reduced to its semantic context, to meaning, to merely part of language). Phoné is the self-revelation of the uniqueness and relationality of every human being.

(Magali) This feminist thread finds substantial echoes in hydro-feminism, where water plays the same role of the voice in terms of resisting any kind of objectivation of the body.

(Elena) Un-censoring the voice through the scream, something very difficult to enact, especially for sexualised or marginalised bodies in public spaces – references to Elena’s experience and work The Resounding Flâneuse, starting from one’s own embodied experience of the past, from testimonies or texts that have been written on voice, on the politics of the body in public space, on silence, silencing. The scream as subjective and oriented to collective practices: the question of the collective scream.

(Magali) The scream as expressions of resilience for marginalised people or marginalised bodies.

(Ruth) It was impossible to find the score of the song from Antonioni’s Deserto rosso. This stresses the subjectivity of the voice that sings in the performative intervention. Giulia’s desperate situation makes of her character a sort of scream, which is paradoxically stressed by her struggle to speak, to express. The absence of the score makes this voice/scream less connected with the past (the score) than with the future: to whom/what is the singing voice that is screaming for Giulia directed? Screaming as trying to reach something/someone unknown, screaming as a way to explore, to search for resonances.

(Giuseppe) The scream is ambiguous, insofar as it can express a command – like the siren as warning tool – thereby saturating the space and leaving the others no room for a response, but can also express an invitation, an urgent call for a response. The scream as the trigger of responsiveness.

(Pauline) The activist Karen Luza is an example of how one can scream for years – as she does in the Atacama desert, literally a vox clamans in deserto – and can build a network of geographical echoes, even beyond her own life. Again, screaming as searching for resonances, as waiting for someone who will hear the scream.

(Ruth) The importance of resonance for art in general. Any performative intervention should not be a show (on an alternative stage), but an unexpected, fragile proposal that is presented in the public space – reference to Ruth’s performative intervention in Venice with the neon text “Mi sono perso” mounted on a boat that wandered throughout the canals during the Venice Biennale. The sirenic voice is a proposal waiting for reaction and feedback.

(Magali) The performance/film interface is also a place of resonance: from film to performance and back to film. There is a dialogue between fixed and impermanent forms. Sirenic resonances speak also for transmediality.

(Fabienne) The songs of the sirens tell us something about isolation and displacement, but they are also a possibility of imagining other ways of communicating and being together. Resonances and echoes, as modes of responsiveness, relate to the commonality of film as a shared experience. In sending out a song, as in Ruth’s Astrale, the sirenic voice tries to touch another: this could be a model for expanded cinema, reformulated through Jane Bennett’s notion of the “sonorous cosmos” from her book The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001). Here, beings, existences – be they human or more-than-human – resonate and vibrate, thus connecting each other.

(Alice) The experience at the festival Bogiaisso in Chioggia is a sort of embodiment of Bennett’s idea of “sonorous cosmos”, or sirenic resonance, because the screened films provide the basis for a genuine dialogue between people reflecting on their deep connection to the environment.

More informations on the participating guests:

Elena Biserna
Ruth Baettig
Pauline Julier
Magali Dougoud
Alice Jasmine Crippa

Film streaming

To accompany the panel discussion with a filmic experience, the curators have selected a series of films on sirens, waters and sounds, which has been screened the Venice event (2 and 3 October 2024).