RadioActive - on Water #5 - River Breathing by Carlos Monleon & Nathaniel Mann

A six-part series by Meira Asher and Stephen Shiell exploring the interactions between transmission, sound, activism and water. Each episode is created by a different artist or group who engage with water politics and the politics of listening through the medium of radio.

In this episode, Nathaniel Mann and Carlos Monleon discuss the activation of different bodies of knowledge and efforts of riverine conservation involved in the process of River Breathing.

River Breathing is an immersive sound installation in which the audience can experience the breathing of the rivers Ebro, Segre and other affluents as a symphony composed of the life cycles of the various species that participate in the pulse of the river. The protagonists of the installation are a choir of naiads, or freshwater clams, which are endangered throughout the Iberian Peninsula but especially in Catalonia and Aragon due to the relentless denaturing of their habitats ,the threat of several invasive (let's call them vigorous!) species, and increasing levels of river pollution.

This choir embodies and gives voice to the river, as the mythological Naiads -spirits of fountains and rivers in ancient Greece- once did. The work transforms scientific models of the metabolism of the Ebro river and its affluents based on historical and real-time data available through sensors and remote sensing systems into multi-channel sound in collaboration with musicians and the help of computer scientists from the UdL (University of Lleida) and biologists from IRTA (Catalunya) and IPE (Aragón).

A series of metabolic scores are produced from the data to be interpreted by musicians , the final composition is completed with underwater recordings of the clams in their conservation tanks. The installation consists of a sculptural sound system made in ceramics and other materials designed in collaboration with sound engineers. A lighting scheme completes the installation.

One of the project’s aims is to make known the complexity of the life of rivers and the delicate nature of maintaining their balance as a way of establishing a relationship of proximity with them and forming emotional bonds of care and responsibility with riparian ecosystems.

Scientific advisor: Rosa Maria Gil. River ecology: Enrique Navarro and Francisco Comín. Clam conservation work: Keiko Nakamura. Sound composition and lighting: Santiago Latorre. Castanets: Miguel Ángel Berna.

Carlos Monleon works with a variety of processes and materials, both living and non-living, that result in sculptural and participatory artworks.These span across different levels of bodily sensation and awareness; from the microbiological to the performative and social bodies. His main line of work traces evolutionary processes that stem from digestion and cognition and result in the distribution of biological processes across multi-species entanglements and cybernetic metabolisms.

Carlos has developed collaborative projects at spaces such as Autoitalia, Seventeen Gallery and Diaspore Project Space, London, Cráter Invertido, Mexico, Hangar, Lisbon as well as institutions such as CA2M, and Matadero, Madrid, HIAP Helsinki, and has shown his individual practice at LUMA Arles, Z33, Istanbul Design Biennial, Porto Design Biennial or the Tallin Biennial amongst others.

Nathaniel Mann (born 1982) is an experimental composer, performer and sound designer. Oscillating between music and sound, Mann has a compositional practice that is expansive in scope and varied in form. He takes on many roles in his work, including researcher, instrument-maker, archive-digger, surround-sound designer, filmmaker, broadcaster, storyteller, producer, curator, entrepreneur, sonic-artist and folksinger. He is also one third of the experimental folk ensemble, Dead Rat Orchestra.

Mann’s compositions probe history, politics and audio culture, resisting established formats and frameworks for creating music. Each work is crafted, adapted and nuanced towards its setting, fuelled by continued dialogue and collaboration with professionals and enthusiasts from varied fields. These have included filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, academics, curators, a pigeon fancier and a swordsmith.

Mann has explored many subjects including the colonial residue of recorded music in South Africa, in dialogue with Andile Vellum, a deaf dancer/choreographer based in Cape Town (Cape Sound Stories, 2016); the psycho-geographic horror of England’s public execution sites (Tyburnia, 2014-17); and the deeply rooted traditions interlinking noise and social control, creating bronze musical meat cleavers with swordsmith Neil Burridge (Rough Music, 2014). He was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award 2019, Arts Foundation Fellow 2018 and his work Pigeon Whistles (2013), a flying orchestra of flute-carrying Birmingham Roller pigeons, won the George Butterworth Prize for Composition in 2015.