Each podcast episode by Land Body Ecologies tells an intimate true story from a local community across the globe to highlight how ecosystem health and mental health are interconnected

 

The first of five stand-alone episodes will tell the story of Finland’s longest river, and two sisters’ journey as they reflect on how the damming of the river shaped their lives.

 

Land Body Ecologies (LBE) is an transdisciplinary research project exploring solastalgia, a concept that sheds light on mental distress specifically caused by environmental change. LBE connects collaborators in a range of fields – from human rights, medicine or psychology to arts, design, sociology and ecology – across a network of hubs, located in Finland, India, Kenya, Thailand, Uganda and the UK. The hubs across the first five sites bring together land-dependent and Indigenous communities at the forefront of today's environmental crisis and land rights issues. In the UK, LBE is a resident of the Wellcome Hub, a dynamic research space within Wellcome Collection, Wellcome’s free museum and library in the heart of London. Amidst these communities’ varied and layered lived experiences, LBE employs design research, storytelling and artistic approaches as ways to reach nuances and deepen the exploration of human experiences and relationships with the environment, offering an alternative to the current dominant, data-driven discourses.

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As part of this exploration of artistic methodologies, on 22 June 2022 Land Body Ecologies will launch The Free River, the first of a five-episode podcast series that will share stories of communities affected by environmental change. The podcast is co-produced with arts studio Invisible Flock and sound artist Chris Watson, whose award winning recordings have often accompanied David Attenborough’s narratives around the planet. Fundamental part of the practices of both Invisible Flock and Watson, sound, in this podcast, transcends the role of documentation and unfolds as artistic expression. “People shared their stories with us, but so did the landscape: we listened to the human voices and their experiences, but we also listened to the world around ourselves,” says Victoria Pratt, Invisible Flock Creative Director.

 

The Free River tells the story of Kemijoki, Finland’s longest river that cuts across the country’s northern region. As the first hydroelectric power station was constructed on the river between 1945–1949, the damming of the river Kemi represented a death blow for a salmon-fishing culture that was centuries old, and changed forever the course and balance of this powerful thriving river and ecosystem. The story is grounded in the experiences of two sisters. A generation apart from each other, they both reflect on how the damming shaped their work and lives. In the episode, they journey through the land as they strive to understand the lasting suffering caused when the hydro dam was constructed across their family home and silenced their river. “For some people, it was hard to talk about their own personal losses, as it's simply not what people do back where we come from…..So, when they could not talk about their losses, some could talk about the salmon. They could talk about what was happening from the salmon's perspective: how it must have been awful for the salmon when they could no longer swim up their home river and how they could no longer access natural waters. It was easier to talk about that,” as sociologist Outi Autti recounts in the podcast.

 

Each episode of storytelling is paired with another side of the same story – a B-side where the landscape, then, speaks for itself. Sounds captured in the environment are turned into sound art, and musical expressions unearth from the land. As Watson describes, “the sounds of ice fracturing under the surface of a frozen river is contrasted by the stillness of the Arctic air above, and finally broken by the mechanical growl of hydroelectric turbines disrupting the flow of the river and changing the entire ecosystem.”

 

The following episode, due to be released in August, will feature the bee keepers of Mau forest, in Kenya, land of the Ogiek people. The Ogiek have cared for the Mau forest by living symbiotically with animals, flowers and trees that grow there, and the bees, for the Ogiek, transition between the physical and their spiritual territories. The episode will tap into the issues of conservation that led to the Ogiek being evicted from their own forest, and the impact this causes both on the people, as well as in the honeybees, whose population is in constant decline, without their caretakers. Future episodes will feature stories from land-dependent and Indigenous communities based in Thailand, Uganda and India.

 

Land Body Ecologies Podcast will be available from 22 June on Spotify, Google Podcast and Apple Podcast, as well as on www.landbodyecologies.com/podcast. Each episode will be available in English as well as in its respective local language – in the case of The Free River, the episode will be released in English and Finnish (separate audio tracks).

 

The podcast is produced by Invisible Flock, Chris Watson and Land Body Ecologies, as part of the Land Body Ecologies’ two-year residency at the Wellcome Hub.

 

 

For images and other media enquiries please contact: press@landbodyecologies.com.

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NOTES TO EDITORS

 

Listings information

Land Body Ecologies Podcast

Episode I: The Free River

Release date: 22 June 2022

Available online on www.landbodyecologies.com/podcast, as well as on Spotify, Google Podcast and Apple Podcast.

 

 

About Land Body Ecologies (LBE)

We are a global interdisciplinary network working to understand and engage with the lived experiences of land trauma among marginalised communities. Our research is rooted within communities at the forefront of today's environmental crisis and land rights issues. Through long form collaboration, we seek to understand the traumas endured when the land suffers, exploring the deep interconnections of mental and ecosystem health.

 

Our team is a global collective of artists, expert communities, researchers, designers,

conservationists, technologists and activists from fields including psychology, arts, human rights, sustainability, sociology, design and medicine. Sited in critical landscapes, our network brings together land-dependent and Indigenous communities. Looking at solastalgia through the lens of these communities allows us to place lived experiences at the forefront of understanding solastalgia, and, together, to explore the complex and fragile relationship between psyche and land.