Sounding Lines / Stijn Demeulenaere

Sounding Lines reflects on the past, present and future changes of the North Sea seabed. The installation brings the sounds from offshore windfarms together with recordings from some of the last remaining wild oyster beds in the North Sea, and processed sea shanties. The sea shanties are sung by an amateur ladies choir from Ostend, embodying a traditional and generational bond to the sea. These three voices come together in an immersive spatialised sound installation. Sounding Lines offers a space where the audience can reflect in how we deal with a space so different from ours, how far our hands reach, ponder about how intertwined our society is with the sea, how complicated that balance is, and wonder where they see themselves in this relationship

The title of the installation refers to the way we used to measure the depth of bodies of water. We've always wanted to know what's down there, what's beneath us. A question that starts with how much space there is there. Nowadays we measure this with sonar. But we used to throw a weight with a line of rope into the sea, with markers telling us the distance it travelled before it hit the sea bed. Sounding here refers to a sound as a body of water. But these days, we should perhaps also listen to the voices of the sea.