How long can a branch bow before it breaks?
Sound installation by Ida Hiršenfelder and Hugo Lioret
Your compassion, answered the shrub,
Arises from a kind nature; but leave off this care.
The winds are less fearful to me than to you.
I bend and do not break.
— Jean de la Fontaine, The Oak and the Reed (Le chêne et le roseau)
All the birds fall silent at the sight of such violence.
Photo-01: Elsewhere is here.
Photo-02: A gentle and precise network
We were listening, and a stream of thoughts flooded our minds.
What was once the lush Hambach Forest is now a field of ecological, sociological, and economic contestation. As artists, we acknowledge the many past efforts to prevent this ecocide. And the forest clings to its fragile life by a thread. We listened to its silent whispers and turned our attention to the non-human forms that continue to resist, persist, and endure despite the inconceivable destruction and violence in their vicinity. Through artistic gestures, we make their living space audible, timidly reveal fragments of their resilience, and give voice to their subtleties.
The site of Hambacher Forest is already known and well-documented; activists, citizens, journalists, and academics have profusely discussed the case, in a manner that we are not claiming here. Several questions arise when faced with such a situation:
What would be the position to adopt?
The social-economic implications of this site, to a certain extent, are not ours. Indeed, we did not occupy the site in the forest with other activists. We do not live in the area close to this site, but we experienced the site and its situation through our sonic sensitivity, listening with our bodies and our will to understand, being attentive to the remaining non-human and human agencies. We present this experience through elements that we could identify as artefacts of civil disobedience, fragments of biodiversity, or the sonic atmosphere of a contested ground. This sonic atmosphere is for us a particular signature of the site that we have not experienced anywhere else. Not truly an audible sound but a subsonic thud, a form of constant pulsating, anxiety-inducing pressure of mining machinery.
Meeting an activist during the first day of field recording, a critical point of our activity appeared just after a few seconds of our conversation:
What are you doing here?
We are here to listen, record and document the biodiversity remaining here.
Asking if this forest was still occupied and if there were still activists here, he, on his own, immediately talked about the notion of glory. Indirectly, he was pointing out the fact that the peak contestation has certainly passed and that many activists were, to a certain extent, looking to be part of ‘something’. In his own words, occupying a forest to contest the preservation of a ground, and this alternative mode of living, are luxuries.
We contemplated similar self-criticism while working on the artistic idea. We choose to think that art and its poetics, despite the privileged conditions of production, are a form of resistance as we unveil the fragile position which is often neglected in dominant discourses. Here, we focus our attention towards the non-human forms that are resisting, persisting and continuing their lives despite inconceivable destruction in their vicinity.
This piece is an homage to the resilience of an ecosystem and its agencies.
One cannot write without an audience and without a myth—without a certain audience created by historical circumstances, without a certain myth of literature that depends, to a very large extent, on the demands of this audience. In a word, the author is in a situation, like all other men. But his writings, like any human project, at once enclose, clarify, and transcend this situation, even explain and found it, just as the idea of a circle explains and founds that of the rotation of a segment. It is an essential and necessary characteristic of freedom to be situated. Describing the situation cannot undermine freedom.
— JP Sartre, Qu’est ce que la littérature, 1947
We also heard some beautiful silences, and saw fragments of life, resistance and resilience.
going back home if you can find it in the dark.
And we compared the loss of the forest to our living space.
From the forest, the pit first appears almost flat, two-dimensional, like an optical illusion. Its scale is difficult to comprehend: a landscape so vast and alien that the mind resists taking it in. What confronts us here is not just a scar in the ground, but a phenomenon that far exceeds human scale, yet it is entirely the result of human activity, a true hyperobject. The proportions unsettle every frame of reference. What lingers is not shock in the conventional sense, but a steady, physical unease, like the low subsonic anxiety-inducing thrum carried in the body. Nothing prepares you for this, nothing convinces you. And still, we try: we compare the devastation to the size of our cities, another form of depletion. At times, these analogies risk doing the opposite, reducing the event to a metaphor, just one more disaster to file away with all the others.We’re now making a translucent construction to give a sense of the scale of devastation.
For the November exhibition, we are preparing a large yet lightweight, permeable installation, which simultaneously serves as a score for the 12-channel composition. Water drips from above, echoing the multinational energy company’s plans to ‘restore’ the pit by flooding it.We will play with these sonic fragments of a forest.
Playing with the memory of our experience in the forest and at the precipice, we will mix a 12-channel composition that will premiere at the exhibition. A mixed-down version will be published on Bandcamp on 20 November.We looked up at the flickering canopies protecting us from the scorching sun.
Sound study description
The study explores the sonic traces of the Hambach Forest, scarred by brown coal surface mining. We present field recordings from within the woodland—its intricate soundscapes, its remaining biodiversity, the intrusion of anthropogenic noise, and the anxiety-inducing subsonic thud of open-pit excavations. Until recently, Hambach held the dishonourable title of Europe’s largest surface mine, later surpassed by the Bełchatów coal mine. It is most strange that open-pit mines carry the names of the very places they have erased.
In the sound installation, we capture the tension between the forest’s biodiversity and the mine’s destruction, bearing witness to both devastation and resilience. The silence of this soundscape shapes a sensory and emotional environment for the audience to bear witness to what remains and how much has been lost to the extractivist machine. This sociomusicological research conveys such tensions through fragile fragments: the silence of the remaining forest, photographs of tiny things, two found objects, a video, a map of recording locations, a spatial installation reminiscent of the desolate landscape, and a 12-channel composition based on the features of the installation. This work searches for ways of speaking about catastrophe, of listening, and of finding hope and traces of wilderness even in the most damaged locations. Through sound and narrative, we tell a multi-sensory story about the possibilities of empathetic coexistence with a landscape in pain.
Credits
Sound poster presented at: CENSE | Beyond Listening 2025: Walking-with changes, Cona Institute, Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana, 22 September 2025, at 16:00–21:00 & 23 September 2025, at 09:00–21.00Exhibition: Malou éditions (Même si), 97 rue de la Santé, Paris, 20 November – 9 December 2025
Editor: Jean-Christophe Aguas
Graphic design: Juanma Gomez
Production: Sektor Institute (Ljubljana) and Malou éditions (Paris)
Co-production: Cona Institute (Ljubljana) and IReMUS
Supported by: Republic of Slovenia – Ministry for Culture, Ljubljana City Municipality – Department for Culture, IReMus, Malou éditions
Ida Hiršenfelder (beepblip) is a Ljubljana-based sound artist interested in sound ecology and spatialisation, addressing themes such as the agency of non-organic others, non-human animal languages, and listening to the inaudible. She frequently composes for contemporary dance, for which she received the Golden Lightning Award from the Bunker Institute for soundscape in the 2023/24 season.
Hugo Lioret is a French sound artist, PhD researcher and mediator based in Paris. He is pursuing a sociomusicological action-research project based on bio-inspiration under the supervision of Hyacinthe Ravet (IReMus, Sorbonne University). His academic work includes reflections on field recording as a musical practice and its role as a tool for music mediation.