A bioacoustics and collaborative chromatogram making workshop facilitated by Sophia Dacy-Cole, Ruby Kammoora, Broni Sargeson and Sammy Hawker.

Sammy Hawker, 2023

This workshop was held in the Plumwood Mountain garden on the 13th October, 2024. It explored listening as a form of activism, the sentience of the unseen, and disintegration as metamorphosis where boundaries of the human and more-than human dissolve.

This workshop is being held at Plumwood Mountain, half an hour from Braidwood and on the unceded lands and waters of the Walbunja people of the Yuin Nation. Plumwood was the home of ecofeminist philosopher Dr. Val Plumwood and has been under the care of a trust since her passing in 2008. 

Participants will meet at the highway gate and walk to Val's house and garden at top of the coastal escarpment (4.8km return). Plumwood Mountain shares tall eucalypt (E. fastigata) and ancient ‘Plumwood’ (Eucryphia moorei) forests with the neighbouring Budawang and Monga National Parks. Hosting a diversity of temperate rainforest and dry sclerophyll communities, Plumwood is home to the greater glider, the common wombat, and the superb lyrebird – among a variety of other creatures. 

During the workshop participants will listen to a live amplification of the garden through contact microphones/hydrophones and then co-create an artwork with a sample of soil. This workshop will explore listening as a form of activism, the sentience of the unseen, and disintegration as metamorphosis where boundaries of the human and more-than human dissolve.

Recommended Reading: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/val-plumwoods-philosophical-animism-attentive-interactions-sentient-world & https://valplumwood.files.word...