Polyphony for Intertidal Ecologies was a participatory workshop and performance event at Monmar (Point Nepean) that took place on 8 February 2025. Participants included: Vāimanatu Avene, Elijah Cristiano, Anna Farago, Frosty, Audax M. Gawler, Bridget Hillebrand, Jivan Simons Mistry, Georgia Nowak, Rosa Mar Tato Ortega, Justine Walsh, Dominic White and Christabel Wigley.
We are walking across the peninsula of Monmar on Bunurong Country, walking from the bay side of the peninsula to the ocean side with the force of the outward flow of low tide. Everyone is chatting — deep in conversations. The tide is still on its way out, revealing a lagoon that intermittently floods and pours into a deep inlet in the bedrock platform. We observe this and wait before deciding to go to the protected rock pools under the large Pleistocene era dune limestone arch. We form small groups and begin to listen underwater, our hearing augmented by a hydrophone, an aural conduit between water and land beings.
The intertidal zone is a temporal threshold, a place where land and sea ecologies intermittently meet across rhythmic durations. We meet and listen with the intertidal acoustic ecologies: clicks, pops, cracks and swelling rushes of water. We speculate upon what we are hearing, possibilities both known and unknown. The intertidal zone is also a place where plastics gather from ocean currents, marking the tide lines with an array of yellow, blue and red specks. We collect the plastics polluting the tide lines along the beach. I think about the work of Canadian researcher Max Liboiron and the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) and consider what will become of these plastics.[1] Liboiron writes:
You can’t 'clean up' plastics because they exist in geological time, and cleaning just shuffles them in space as they endure in time… their long temporality means their future effects are largely unknown making uncertain the guarantee of settler futures. [2]
If plastics endure and accumulate as we shuffle them from one place to another, how can their presence and impacts be made known in their future relations with ecologies? Could listening be a way to understand the immensity of accumulated plastics over time? Back at the workshop, the group returns to the studio, where we lay out the plastic pollution collected and consider what sounds could emanate from these objects.
In the evening, low, fast-moving clouds begin to shed light showers as people arrive for the performance. Together we sit and listen to a composition I made of recordings of underwater ecologies at Monmar. Different proximities across multiple durations — rushing, gurgling, snapping, popping, crunching and dripping. Slowly we introduce micro acoustic sounds of the plastic pollution, moving in close to your ear. Georgia scratches a foam pellet against a polystyrene float, Jivan bristles a large polypropylene sheet, Justine trinkles a plastic cap with small plastic pieces, Dominic reverberates a nylon rope tied to a plastic bottle and Vāimanatu drags a rubber thong against concrete. These sounds move from the close proximity of your ear to an accumulation of near and distant rustling, scratching and scraping.
The relations of people, intertidal ecologies and plastics pollution all resonate together through haptic plastic sounds and hydrophone recordings. These relations form a polyphony of discrete reverberations that collectively immerse the listener into possible futures of an intertidal ecology of water, plants, animals and accumulated plastics.
We acknowledge and pay respect to the Bunurong people, the Traditional Custodians of the land and waters of where this project took place.
Polyphony for Intertidal Ecologies was an offsite project commissioned as a part of the exhibition The Ecologies Project at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (MPRG). Participants with a shared interest in underwater ecologies were invited through an open call. Thank you to the MPRG team for their support, to Bunurong Land Council for their advice on the project and to the participants for their generous contributions.
[1] Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) is an interdisciplinary natural and social science lab space dedicated to good land relations directed by Dr. Max Liboiron at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. CLEAR’s website is https://civiclaboratory.nl.
[2] Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, Duke University Press, Durham, 2021, pp. 16-17.