An ongoing sound art research project – in collaboration with theologian and dance researcher Laura Hellsten – exploring the acoustic, mythological, and ecological dimensions of dunderflisan—thunder-stones found along the Åland archipelago, with a primary focus on the remote site of Östra Mörskär. Historically believed to emit sound and act as fog beacons, these stones occupy a liminal position in Ålandic life, where navigation, weather lore, and cosmology converge. The project investigates how these stones resonate—materially, culturally, and imaginatively—within the island landscape.

Through field recordings, interviews with local inhabitants, and archival research, the work traces how dunderflisan have functioned as both practical markers and mythic agents. In oral traditions, the stones are said to “speak” during fog or atmospheric shifts, guiding seafarers and signalling unseen forces. This blend of sensory perception and folklore forms the project’s core inquiry: how sound mediates human–environment relations, and how mythic structures persist within contemporary ecological awareness.

The artistic component unfolds as a site-responsive sound installation developed in dialogue with the landscape itself. Using low-frequency transducers, resonant materials, and processed field recordings, the installation seeks to transpose the imagined and remembered sonic presence of dunderflisan into a sculptural acoustic form. Rather than a single fixed presentation, the installation evolves through iterative experiments in situ—on coastal rocks, in abandoned structures, or within boats on land—allowing the environment to shape its tonal and spatial qualities.

By reactivating the sonic imagination surrounding dunderflisan, the project invites new forms of listening to the Åland landscape, foregrounding the entanglement of myth, memory, and ecological perception.

Facilitators: Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Eduardo Abrantes

Performers: Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Eduardo Abrantes, Olya Zikrata, Polina Shubina

Changed and Changing: A Participatory Soundtracking of the Site is a collaborative workshop that invites participants to collectively compose a soundtrack for a video adaptation of Gardiner’s ecopoem “Changed and Changing,” a text shaped by processes of decay, exposure, and environmental transformation. Developed as part of an ongoing artistic partnership between Gardiner and Abrantes—initiated in Berlin in 2024—the project investigates the performative and ecological potential of sound-poetry.

For this Montréal iteration, the black-box space at Concordia University becomes a temporary sound studio. The video is first screened with only partial audio, leaving room for participants to inhabit and reshape its sonic field. Through multiple takes, the audience records overlapping soundtracks, experimenting with how voice, noise, rhythm, and gesture can “synch” with the visual environment to propose new ways of sensing and weathering the climate crisis.

The session includes an open discussion on collective authorship, the ethics of shared sonic production, and the idea of “being in flow” within the Anthropocene. By foregrounding bodies in shared space and the co-creation of sound and image, the workshop cultivates a form of radical, situated listening—an artistic ecology unfolding in real time, attentive to change, vulnerability, and the possibilities of collective attunement.

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.