Two interconnected works born from the ongoing collaboration between sound artist Eduardo Abrantes and Canadian poet laureate Elee Gardiner. Together, the pieces explore how language, voice, and embodied listening can create porous spaces where memory, sensation, and narrative drift into one another.

Both works begin from Gardiner’s poetic practice, which moves fluidly between the intimate and the elemental, and from Abrantes’s interest in sound as a medium that unsettles fixed meanings. Their collaboration treats poetry not as text to be illustrated, but as a living material—something that breathes, resonates, and transforms when carried into the acoustic realm.

To Swim the Poem immerses the listener in a sonic environment where Gardiner’s words are stretched, submerged, and refracted. Through layered vocal textures, underwater recordings, and shifting spatial acoustics, the piece evokes the sensation of moving through a poem as one moves through water—buoyant, disoriented, and held by currents of language.

Even If We Never Figure Out What Happened approaches voice as a fragile trace of experience. Fragmented phrases, breaths, and resonant tones form a sonic archaeology of emotion, inviting listeners to inhabit the spaces between what is said and what remains unsaid. The work lingers in uncertainty, embracing the poetic potential of not knowing.

Together, these two pieces form a shared inquiry into how sound and poetry can co-compose states of attention, vulnerability, and embodied meaning—an exploration of listening as a way of being with another’s voice.