Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change the order of who is allowed to occupy—command—space. Her research continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound; often through collaborative projects centring listening as a practice of deep attention, affiliation and reciprocity.
She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound, a work considering the inherent power in/of that which falls outside of administrative control — as a way of thinking through the sonic as critical agitator: how sound resists categorisation in the archive; how sound makes and disperses knowledge beyond the bounds of the institutional building.
In this essay, Ella Finer presents a poetic and sensorial call for remembering and reminds us of the debts we are compelled to forget. Published into the historic and unprecedented days of the heatwave in the UK, into the unabating political uncertainty and governmental fires, this essay exposes the burning present, past and future.