The sonic melting: Sound art and ethnographic field recordings in an Andean glacier

Tomás Tello, Daniel Llermaly, and Gustavo Valdivia

During most of the year, the grasslands that feed the herds of alpacas, llamas and sheep of nearly 100 families in Phinaya, a semi-nomadic pastoralist community in the Southern Andes of Perú, can only be irrigated by several rivers that originate in the Quelccaya ice cap, the largest tropical glacier in the world. Due to its size and location in the Southern Peruvian Andes, the Quelccaya has also become a privileged site for climate science research. In fact, a set of ice cores obtained recently from this glacier are considered to be today “the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date” and, therefore, one of the most important pieces of evidence for the scientific understanding of the last 2000 years of global climate history (Thompson et al. 2013).
Since 2014, we have been visiting the Quelccaya to register the sounds of its melting ice, as part of our ongoing experimental collaborative project interested in building a different approach to think about questions of climate change. As a result of these experience, using a variety of low/hi-fi and digital/analogical recording devices, we have produced a set of ethnographic field recordings that present a sonic narration of our encounter with this glacier. In general, our project is oriented by the idea that expanding our sensorial possibilities, in a way that allows us to perceive and (re)engage with our ecological environments in an unrestrained way, is a condition
for producing a better understanding, or “a denser form of intelligibility” as Claude Lévi-Strauss once said, of climate change.
Climate scientists have confirmed that the Quelccaya is retreating at a rate that has no historical precedent in the last 6000 years. Local people in Phinaya have also noticed that the Quelccaya is retreating. There is less ice and its color has changed in the last decade, they frequently say.
Also, they know that this glacier’s retreat is a threat to their way of living. Since the 1980s, several lakes have been formed around the Quelccaya as a result of glacier retreat. Moreover, in 2006, a piece of the glacier crashed into one of those lakes and generated an outburst flood that affected several pastoral families, their land and animals in Phinaya.
This project begins with the observation that the extraordinary amount of resources deployed in the last years for climate science research has not expanded the scientific understanding of the local environmental realities in the Andes. On the contrary, it can be argued that it has promoted research agendas which have been only interested in studying these local environments, or particular elements of it, only in certain situations where they have contributed to explain global processes; reinforcing the problems associated to scale and the possibility of representing the local in scientific discourse.
Through our work, we try to overcome the destructive results of a specific type of scientific subjectivity: namely, one which aims to, on the one hand, represent the natural world as a huge
mechanical system regulated by strictly deterministic general laws; and, on the other, project this reductionist view into the future, by means of mathematical models, while elevating it as an universal predictor of human destiny. We are interested, instead, in reflecting about the possibilities of a different experience of knowing the natural world, that is; one which is not centered on deciphering its measurable, certain, and systemic properties; but embracing, instead, its immeasurable, mysterious, and chaotic character.

Sonic Melting