Sound-Led Imaginaries for Environmental Remediation

In collaboration with the Common Guild and led by Mathias Arrignon, this workshop engages with acoustic ecology, field recording and sound art practices as a space for imagining brighter futures, in which human-made sound is no longer experienced as pollution but can instead become a regenerative force with positive effects on the environment.

Taking scientific research into acoustic enrichment as a starting point, a technique that uses the playback of sounds from healthy ecosystems to regenerate damaged environments, the workshop will explore the imaginaries and possibilities opened up by this method. It will consider how sound might move beyond its role as a means of documenting environmental damage to become an active element of regeneration. Through reading, sound and film material selected by the artist, participants will collectively reflect on how sound might contribute to revitalising our world, oscillating between scientific research, fictional post-futurism and the poetics of the soundscape.

The workshop will culminate in a collective, site-responsive performance. Participants will move through the space carrying portable speakers containing field recordings, gradually dispersing sounds throughout the venue. As these mobile sound sources interact with the architecture, they will activate changing reflections and resonances, creating an evolving spatialised soundscape. This performative experiment will offer a metaphorical interpretation of acoustic enrichment, asking how the sounds we introduce into the world might become not a source of harm, but an act of care.

Open to all (no experience required), but particularly useful for those with interests in environmental, sound arts, field recordings and/or experimental practices.

About the artist:

Mathias Arrignon is an artist from Val-de-Marne (France), currently residing in Glasgow and working across Europe. Driven by listening, he is using this sensitive language to foster environmental care and to narrate realities which suffer from invisibilation. His works merge field recording practices, audio technology, interactive installations and participatory performances to instil forms of interconnectedness with worlds that are often more-than- human.

As a sound designer with a strong interest in media of transmission, he is working for audio-visual productions to facilitate the development of narratives whether on radiophonic waves, or through the audible strata of films and documentaries. On a more transdisciplinary level, his expertise in contemporary audio technology is also at the intersection of several fields by collaborating with other artists and design studios.

His work has been presented and developed at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Listen Gallery, Hospitalfield House, Southwark Park Galleries, Centre Intermondes, INA GRM, and The Arctic Circle Residency, with broadcasts on Resonance FM, Sonic Matter, Radiophrenia and Radio Campus Paris. He received a Sound of the Year Award in 2020 and in 2025, and a Phonurgia Nova Award in 2024.

This workshop has been programmed by The Common Guild and GLOSS on the occasion of and in response to ‘Zifzafa’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s current exhibition
with The Common Guild at 5 Florence Street where both organisations are based.

‘Zifzafa’ (2025) is Abu Hamdan’s recent body of work comprising of a multichannel audiovisual installation, performance and video game which demonstrates the effects of noise pollution and green colonialism activities in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, or Jawlan, in south-western Syria. ‘Zifzafa’ is an archaic and sonorous word borrowed from Arabic poetry describing a wind that shakes and rattles everything in its path.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan has over a decade of experience investigating audio on behalf of people under attack from state authorities. In 2023 he founded Earshot the world’s first not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the study of audio for human rights and environmental advocacy. In 2019, he won the Edvard Munch Art Award, which included being given a solo exhibition at MUNCH, Oslo, which was the first presentation of ‘Zifzafa’.