I weave fragments of memory and identity into performances, maps, and sounds that breathe in thresholds, between intimacy and distance, absence and presence, human and more-than-human worlds.
Hljóðeyja: The Art of Listening Otherwise (work in progress)
a long-term practice rooted in non-extractive listening.
An ongoing practice in non-extractive listening shaped by sound, place, and embodied attention. The work explores listening with care, rest, and limits, asking not just what we can hear, but how, and who it costs.
Through listening scores, selective recording, and refusal, the project explores how bodies, technologies, and environments co-shape what listening can be — and where it must stop.
More information available here.
Latest Work
A digital grief map tracing diasporic memory and colonial legacy
The work draws on sensory fragments: video textures, written descriptions, sonic impressions composed and recorded in shifting states of remembering, seeing and hearing. Performance becomes a method of entering memory through the body, tentative, porous, uncertain. Some gestures are rehearsed while others dissolve before they arrive. Parts of the map are coded generatively, allowing memory to reconfigure itself with each view. The limitations of my hearing, its fragility, its distortion, became collaborators in the process. They shaped the tone, the tempo, the form.
Leah M. Bowie 