This island is alive with ghosts.
Tonight, every leaf is an ear... 1
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every leaf is an ear / notes toward a transmitted topography of Kapiti Island documents a series of mini FM radio programmes transmitted, alongside other sound and writing projects, over six weeks, between the months of april and may 2012, within the borders of biosecure bird sanctuary kapiti island, located 5km off the coast of the lower north island of aotearoa / new zealand.
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every leaf is an ear investigates the island sanctuary and its attendant set of circumstances as a potential corollary for the use of mini FM radio as 'sovereign media' within the wider ecologies of the mediascape, the establishing of a small, bounded, unstable signal as a small circle of transmission which engages with the specifics of a geographically and historically restricted landscape. in attempting to situate such transmission as praxis within the environment of the island itself, as well as allow for the occasional 'listening in' via internet radio and simulcasts to offshore and global stations, and other sound projects using field recordings, the project approaches radio art as a form of fieldwork, in part taking as provocation the unrealised sketch for a project noted by canadian acoustic ecology founder r murray schafer, drawn up before the availablity of technology that would make it possible:
"A few years ago Bruce Davis and I had an idea for what we called Wilderness Radio. The plan was to put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and to broadcast whatever might be happening out there: the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals - all the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities."2
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in the series of transmissions which comprise every leaf is an ear, the island is overheard as a series of fleeting, poetic, audible (and sometimes inaudible) moments which function as sound libraries aware of their own partiality, which read gaps and erasures as presences, and electromagnetism as a palpable material force. the richly textured nuances of birdsong and other unique soundmarks of kapiti ("what's out there" / that collection of "uneventful events") are understood not as a series of isolated incidents of sonic significance, a radiophonic sound-mark museum which, as a collection, isolates sounds into a frozen stasis like a series of stuffed birds in glass vitrines, but instead understands sound as dynamic and communicative (and the observer as an influence on the thing they observe), each collected insight being part of a wider living audible world going on regardless, unconcerned whether the human ear, the radio-ear, is listening in, or not.
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kapiti's island-ness, its shored-up holding of a place of safe harbour where birds are left unmolested by introduced predators, can from such an experiential perspective be read not so much as the marker of a lost utopia which replicates in microcosm a nostalgic, a-cultural vision of an impossible 'pre-human' new zealand, but as a place with a very material situatedness, amid a density of competing historical narratives, territorialisations and overlaps, in which the small thread of an ongoing alternate reality, a continuing pocket of resistance to ecological and cultural homogenisation, coheres; its particularity and locality running parallel to the standardising currents of the 21st century, its very existence denying the 'inevitability' of such an encroach.
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1. Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, 'Sanctuary of Spirits : a Pattern of Voices, I. Kapiti', from Kapiti, selected poems 1947-71, the Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1972
2. R Murray Schafer, 'Radical Radio', in Sound by Artists, D. Lander & M. Lexier (eds), 1990