Collective Notes @ Neun Kelche, Berlin (Image by Dittrich Schmick)

Collective Notes takes protest chants, including those of the international Earth Strike movement in Berlin (2019), as the starting point for artistic research in an evolving laboratory environment. Media and sound artist Maria Thrän and sound artist Samuel Hertz connect these chants to sites of ecological crisis within Berlin’s climate zone, before extending their research outward.

Through this comparison, protest documentation and environmental sound become part of an experimental archival practice that traces complex relationships between the places and spaces of the climate crisis. The workspace continually changes as a laboratory throughout the five-week exhibition. Hertz and Thrän question how archives are created, who can access them and what purposes they serve. At the project space Neun Kelche, sound, image, and text come together as the artists explore expansive, participatory approaches to archiving social-media documentation and environmental change.

At Uncanny Garden (22–23 May 2024), Collective Notes was presented as an eight-channel sound installation without video at the University of Washington Biology Greenhouse. Protest chants and environmental recordings sounded among the living plants. Visitors encountered the archive through listening and movement, with distance and position shaping the relations between the recorded sounds, their bodies and the greenhouse.

The exhibition’s focus on decolonization brought the work’s questions about archiving into relation with the greenhouse itself. Botanical collecting has been entangled with colonial projects of extraction, classification and control. Here, the care involved in sustaining plant life sits alongside questions of who gets to collect, name and organise it. Bringing a sound archive into this setting asks what happens when plants or recordings are separated from the places and relationships that sustain them, and how listening might keep those connections present.

Uncanny Garden · Exhibition information, University of Washington