UMIFRE

Siyanda Kobokana, a PhD student in history at the University of the Western Cape, has been in residence at the Fondation Fiminco and EUR ArTeC, in Greater Paris, from October 20 to December 20, 2025, as part of our creative research residency program, a partnership between IFAS-Research, EUR ArTeC and Fondation Fiminco.

During the residency, Siyanda has been developing his PhD project, “Ecological Listening: A Sonic Method for Climate Justice from the Margins”. The project explores how sound—whether carried through floods, radios, voice notes, or everyday environments—shapes public understanding of the climate crisis. It brings together sensory history, community media, and climate justice in order to foreground the experiences of communities who are often left out of mainstream climate conversations.

Events in Residency

1. Farewell Listening Event – 6 December 2025, Fondation Fiminco (Romainville)

As part of concluding his residency, Siyanda and other fellow artists in various disciplines will host a special farewell event at the Fondation Fiminco on 6 December 2025. The event will feature an intimate sound exhibition that traces the early stages of his research journey. The installation includes recordings from nearby running rivers, the changing textures of rain, the subtle movements of the Fiminco garden, and the recorded reflections and voices of students and collaborators. Together, these elements sketch the sensory and emotional landscape that informed Siyanda’s turn toward ecological listening as a method. This farewell evening offers visitors a first encounter with the sensibilities and questions that would eventually grow into the broader project.

2. BarTeC Event – 18 December 2025, Fondation Fiminco (Romainville)

On 18 December 2025, from 18:30 to 21:00, Siyanda will present a further iteration of his work at the Fondation Fiminco during a BarTec event organised by the EUR ArTeC. The event, titled “Listening to Climate Change: Sound, Knowledge and Decolonial Futures”, brings together artists and researchers exploring sound as a way of rethinking environmental knowledge. Siyanda will present alongside Diane Schuh, with Alto Clark joining as an invited artist. Together, they will open a shared space for thinking about how listening practices across art, research, and everyday life might shift how climate change is understood and felt.

More about Siyanda’s project “Ecological Listening: A Sonic Method for Climate Justice from the Margins”

Listening to the Floods

In the wake of devastating floods across post-apartheid South Africa—notably in KwaZulu-Natal and most recently in Mthatha—a new kind of urgency has emerged around climate change, one that is experienced most acutely by those in marginalised and historically neglected regions. These floods are more than environmental events. They are sonic events. Yet, dominant media and policy responses privilege sight: we are shown images of disaster, maps of rainfall, and satellite scans. Rarely are we asked to listen.

This project poses a central question: What does it mean to listen to a flood? What might such listening reveal about the political and historical dimensions of climate change in South Africa? Through a concept he calls ecological listening, Siyanda proposes a decolonial method of engaging climate crisis by focusing on sound—on the frequencies of pain, urgency, memory, and resistance that visual representations often erase.

Theoretical Framing: From Césaire to the Posthumanism

Taking up Aimé Césaire’s notion of “thingification” (2) and Frantz Fanon’s call for a “new humanism” (3), Siyanda’s project pushes them into the terrain of posthumanism: what becomes of the human when water overwhelms boundaries, when voice notes replace newspapers, and when transistor radios speak more urgently than policy briefs? Siyanda aims to critically engage with the binary of human and nature, and the presumed neutrality of technology, by asking how sound itself unsettles colonial boundaries of knowledge.

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reflections on climate as both planetary and historical (4) provide a theoretical anchor for the tension between local flood experiences and global systems. Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects—phenomena like climate change that are massively distributed and difficult to perceive (5)—resonates deeply with the affective and disorienting experience of floods. Ecological listening becomes a way to sense and interpret the nonlocal, viscous temporality of climate. At the same time, scholars like Andreas Malm (6) and Jason Moore (7) challenge the neutrality of the Anthropocene, pushing instead for a critique of the Capitalocene.

Siyanda’s method responds to these critiques by tracing how racialised infrastructures, systemic neglect, and capitalist extractions are all made audible in flood-affected zones.

Methodology: Ecological Listening as Practice

Ecological listening is at once method and critique. It engages:

Field recordings of flood-affected environments in KZN and the Eastern Cape;
WhatsApp voice notes and community radio broadcasts during disaster moments;
Archival sound materials from SABC and grassroots collections;
AI-generated sonifications of weather data and historical silence.

Listening here is political. It asks not only what happened but who was able to speak, whose voices reached whom, and what technologies made that possible or impossible. This methodology foregrounds media as infrastructure, and sound as historical trace.

IFAS-Recherche—EUR ArTeC—Fondation Fiminco Reasearch Creation Residency

Paris, as the host city of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference and the birthplace of the historic Paris Agreement, holds a symbolic place in the global architecture of climate governance. While this agreement signaled a new era of international cooperation, it also revealed persistent inequalities in how climate responsibilities are distributed, narrated, and enacted—especially between the Global North and South. To carry out a project rooted in the soundscapes of South Africa’s climate suffering within this global epicenter is both strategic and subversive: it allows to insert voices from the margins into one of the world’s most visible climate discourses, not as supplementary data but as epistemological interventions in their own right.

During the 2-month residency, Siyanda intends to:

-Develop a multichannel sound installation, tentatively titled When the Waters Speak, using material gathered in South Africa and composed in collaboration with sound artists at Fondation Fiminco. It will offer an immersive experience of sonic memory, technological failure, and survival. It will not attempt to represent the floods, but to unsettle the very ways we come to “know” them;
-Conduct archival visits and network with scholars and artists working at the intersection of climate, media, and technology in France;
Present his installation on December 18, at a bArTeC event, organised by the EUR ArTeC at the Fondation Fiminco, where he will invite feedback and engage in critical dialogue.

Outputs and Impact: Toward Climate Education from the Margins

Beyond critique, this project is deeply pedagogical. It asks how ecological listening might become a form of aesthetic education in the sense articulated by Premesh Lalu (1)—an education that reconfigures how we sense the world and reclaims the human through sensibility and imagination. In spaces where climate change remains an abstract or inaccessible discourse, the installation and soundwork aim to teach otherwise: to make floods felt as historical events, not just environmental ones.

By returning the residency’s outcomes to primary schools, high schools, and public community forums, this project envisions climate education that is participatory, decolonial, and multilingual. It dreams of schoolchildren speaking back to the flood in isiXhosa, isiZulu, or Sesotho, telling their own stories, naming their own knowledge, and composing futures in their own voices.

More broadly, the work aims to rethink climate education from the margins. It resists the idea that knowledge must come from global centres and instead insists that the margins are not empty—they are resonant. Listening, then, becomes a radical act of reattunement: to pain, to history, to each other.
This project is for the unheard, the waterlogged, the disconnected. And it is a call to listen differently.

References

(1) Lalu, Premesh. Undoing Apartheid. Polity Press, 2022.
(2) Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press, 2000.
(3) Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963.
(4) Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222.
(5) Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
(6) Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016.
(7) Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.

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Siyanda Kobokana’s Research-Creation residency on “Ecological Listening – Sensory Histories of Climate Change and Media in South Africa”

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