Silent Whale Letters

Extending their conversations around the limitations of human senses in relation to more-than-human realities, close collaborators Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini present a reading of their Silent Whale Letters.

First conceived by Vibeke Mascini during her residency at Delfina Foundation in 2020, this inaugural reading – available to listen to daily at 6pm BST/ 7PM CEST over the course of a week – of the first six letters of correspondence launches the project’s forthcoming presentation on Ocean Archive – where their exchange will continue, with a new letter published each fortnight until spring 2022, accompanied by guest responses.

In their ongoing correspondence, the artists reflect on ‘silent whale’ – an inaudible sound recording residing in the British Library Sound Archive – and other such ‘silent’ subjects. To date, their exchange has moved through discussions of long distance communication, undercurrents, wave-lengths, mysterious scales and the watery acoustic commons – continually underscored by the beat of the archival infrasonic whale voice.

This event is a collaboration between Delfina Foundation and TBA21–Academy and is introduced by the Directors of the two organisations, Aaron Cezar and Markus Reymann.

BIOGRAPHIES

Ella Finer‘s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing and curating with a particular interest in how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge or change the order of who is allowed to occupy – command – space. She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound.

Vibeke Mascini explores, through sculptures, installations, video and text, a scaling of abstract phenomena into a sensorial scope, with the intention to seek agency from intimacy. In long-term collaboration with scientists, engineers, government employees and musicians she proposes a conscious understanding of electric energy as a statement of interconnectedness and entanglement—between species, media and nature, matter and energy. Vibeke was an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation during spring 2020, supported by Mondriaan Foundation, and is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

ABOUT

TBA21–Academy is a contemporary art organization and cultural ecosystem fostering a deeper relationship to the Ocean through the lens of art to inspire care and action. In 2019, the Academy has launched two initiatives to share its research and practice with the wider public: the physical venue Ocean Space in Venice, and the digital platform Ocean Archive. Ocean Archive is a digital organism for a living ocean; bringing together the multitude of voices and stories around the Ocean and connecting those striving to nurture and protect it. Designed as a storytelling and pedagogical tool, the Archive translates current knowledge about the Ocean into a shared language that enables us to make better decisions for urgently needed policies. Stories are a new feature of Ocean-Archive.org, designed to navigate content on the platform – by adding narratives to the items and collections, Stories help us to better understand the Ocean’s many voices.

Delfina Foundation, based in the heart of London, is an independent non-profit established in 2007 and dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and nurturing creative practice by developing residencies for international and UK-based creative practitioners, curating public programmes from exhibitions to events, and forging international partnerships.

A project by Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini