Listening Landscape: About Landscape & Translation

Abstract

This presentation discusses Listening Landscapes, a collaborative video essay that takes landscape as its central question: not as scenery to observe, but as something felt, heard, and translated. Moving between seascapes, reversed footage, hand-drawn imagery, and poetic text, the work asks who a landscape belongs to and what it means to inhabit one. The video proceeds in a meditative rhythm: waves move backward, a figure retreats into the horizon, and drawn images dissolve into one another in layered superimposition. Sound gathered from border zones and thresholds is treated as texture rather than illustration: close, bodily, and almost private. Text interrupts and completes the image as a counterpoint, reframing what is seen and heard and questioning our attention and understanding of the frame. The sequences suspend orientation, transforming familiar landscapes into something stranger and more open. Landscape is understood here on multiple levels: physical terrain, its representation through image and drawing, and the mental landscapes of memory, displacement, and belonging. Beneath the formal exploration lies an autobiographical reflection on migration, translation, and the experience of looking at a landscape from the position of an outsider.