Esther Kokmeijer has put the text of the law of the sea of UNCLOS, more specifically the section on deep sea mining that was added in '94, on a porcelain sheet to indicate that you have to take good care of it. Porcelain is strong but the sheet is so fine that it is also easy to break, which reflects the fragility of the agreements, if you break them, it is irreversible. Agreement with Nature Pacific seafarers developed indigenous navigational techniques to voyage between islands relying primarily on the sun, stars and winds. One of the least and last understood navigation traditions comes from the Marshall Islands of Micronesia, where navigators remotely sense land by detecting how islands disrupt swells. The ‘navigators’ use elaborate mental representations of space, embodied knowledge of the ocean and voyaging strategies. Basically they could ‘read’ the waves. This knowledge was recorded in stick charts: schematic sea charts in which sticks indicate patterns of swell, currents and waves around the islands. The charts were used as a tool to transfer knowledge, and not necessarily as an orientation tool at sea because wave navigators rely on their senses for orientation.

Stijn Demeulenaere described his search for underwater sound in the North Sea and the confrontation with the increasing noise pollution. He used audio samples and noise maps. Stijn Demeulenaere made underwater sound recordings at the southern and northern borders of the North Sea: first along the coast of Belgium, from Grevelingen, over the Western Scheldt, Zeebrugge and Ostend, right up to Dunkirk. Then Stijn travelled to Norway to make more recordings in the waters around Bergen. In our North Sea, under water, sight is limited, often just a few meters. At most it is about 30 meters. Sound however travels much much further under water. For this reason it is central to a lot of the marine life, for communication, navigation, foraging and mating. A true sonic world, a language that is mysterious to us, and often beyond comprehension. However, The North Sea is one of the busiest in the world, almost every inch of it knows some form of human occupation. And therefore the North Sea is also one of the loudest in the world, human sounds blanketing the whole sea floor. Noise from the countless ships, but also drilling, oilrigs, the construction of wind farms, fishing, and fish farms. At the moment researchers are trying to figure out what a normal baseline for background noise could be, and how it might affect wildlife. Some of the research is done with the aim of trying to regulate, and subdue, the human noise in our waters.

During her presentation for ASftS Marialena Marouda introduced the work of the Oceanographies Institute, by talking about its history, it‘s main practices, it‘s collaborators and modes of working. After storytelling, she sang some of TOI‘s Ocean Conversations and Demonstrations with the help of TOI‘s collection of sounding objects. TOI collects and reenacts people’s personal stories about their encounters with the ocean. Where scientific researchers use microscopes and petri dishes, TOI uses microphones and the sound of the voice, or the sound of objects –a pencil, as it draws the sign of infinity, for example– as a means to study human-ocean kinships.

“Before the emergence of literacy, oral cultures were consolidated without written text, but through avast array of cultural forms. Song and ritual certainly, but to me the most interesting are ways of ‘storing’ knowledge directly into the environment. We lived like this for tens of thousands of years, which has been almost entirely forgotten, and there are no terms to describe these practices, but we may still be wired for it. By linking stories and characters to features in the landscape, thinking becomes spatial. I’m no longer just walking to the supermarket, but through the evolutionary history of humanity, because that is what I’ve stored throughout that street. Literacy has a big disadvantage. When I walk past my bookshelf, nothing really happens. The ideas are inactively stored on pages, but when knowledge is surrounding you spatially it forms an active structure. For example, when I walk past the café that represents the 1950s in my ‘timeline’, the green sides of the billiard-table signify the Delta plan. And it is there always! Every time I walk there I see the Delta works and the 1953 floods that triggered it. And I see them in the context of the 20 th century and beyond (the rest of the street) back to the early natural historians of Zeeland who reside centuries back along the street. Some of my mental world is now structured externally. And active in a way my bookshelf isn’t. After hardly a year of low-key practice my world has gained an entire extra layer of liveliness and guidance. Slowly I’m starting to get it. How the land (and the sea) can speak. “