Tsunami Listening

In response to the profound environmental turbulence following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, a visual artist, a composer, an anthropologist, and an architect collaborated on a project that would experiment with the human capacity to coexist symbiotically with the more-than-human world after Fukushima. By introducing a sensorial installation to the Japanese Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) through their combined methodologies, they were able to invoke the ‘temporal undulation’ of a tsunami as ‘hyperobject’ (Morton, 2013). Otherworldly images of deep sea boulders found on island shores of Okinawa that were deposited by a great wave revealed unexpected ecosystems that were emphasised by a ‘Zombie Music’ reminiscent of birdsong. Large balloons acted as lungs that supplied air to carefully placed recorder flutes that mechanically performed and created resonances and dissonances within the space. The storytelling power of comparative mythology as wall text established a contemporary allegory for cohabiting an alternative space-time. I argue that, together, these elements introduced an ‘ecopoetic’ and ‘geophonic’ potential for what might be termed ‘Tsunami Listening’. This paper analyses Cosmo-Eggs as a site for such attunements by turning to the remobilisation of Indigenous animisms and the problematisation of machinic animisms within cultural studies and the environmental humanities (Conty, 2022; Mbembe 2020; Plumwood, 2009; Stengers, 2012). If ‘animism has (re)emerged as a grassroots response to [...] disasters in postmodernising Japan’ (Yoneyama, 2017), then it is perhaps to address the urgency of how one can ‘coexist with the monster that is the Anthropocene’ (Bradley, 2019).