Faune Y.

"Y O U  B E L O N G  H E R E: Elements of Fiction" is a photo-based project that reflects on the possibilities of sound and language and the places we insert ourselves in as an attempt to understand others. This project is composed by three different parts, the first one is the documentation of different conversations with nature, the second one is a translation from sound to image of said communication, and the third one is a disjointed narrative of people walking towards bodies of water.

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The quotes here are from a research paper I wrote for the project.

"I think we can communicate with plants if we use the language they use, their actions, and processes. I gave it a try. I started intonating the first letter I could think of: “A”. I felt the air coming out of my body, the sound resonating against my chest. At the same time I felt the air coming from the woods against my skin, we were talking. I recorded the sounds coming out of me with a separate microphone and let the camera built-in microphone captured the ambient sound. I did that four times in different spots around the woods and stream. Sometimes my voice would hum a melody, sometimes it would be just me breathing. As for the ambient sound: wind, water against the river rocks, birds, people walking around, a dog barking in the background. I let myself feel the space and react to it, be calm or impatient. Observative."

"(...) Although, every symbolic expression, including every letter of the alphabet, must allow enough iterability, this does not take away our capacity to individually interpret each symbol. By understanding media as both, an idiosyncratic interpretative experience and a semiotic practice, we can lessen the division between types of media. We can move away from seeing images to feeling the image; from touching objects to hear their materiality; from listening sounds to seeing them."

"The audio of the conversations I had in the woods were developed in the darkroom, I named them “photographic sounds”. I extracted the audio from the conversations and played them on speakers as I exposed photographic paper in the darkroom and place it on top of the speaker. I poured developer over and the sound coming out of the speaker made the developer vibrate on the surface of the paper. The result, a photographic sound, was a black stain with irregular edges on a white canvas. A connection between sound and voice, light and darkness."