Multispecies Duet: on trembling and listeling

Speculative sound performance.

Concept
elena victoria pastor

Manaus, 2025

In November 2025, at immersive art residency de Labverde, Elena Victoria staged a subtle yet radical act of ecological reciprocity with aSocratea exorrhiza—the so-called "walking palm." Rather than documenting nature, the performance operationalizes kinship as a sonic methodology. Drawing on Amazonian ontologies where agency is distributed across beings, Victoria listened with hydrophones and geophones to the water held within the plant's aerial roots—an element already heavy with memory and circulation.

The resulting composition emerges from contact: her gestures coax vibration from the roots, their resonance becoming voice. This is not mimicry but co-production—a multispecies duet where the human body becomes a sounding board for vegetal agency. By amplifying what is usually inaudible, Elena Victoria renders visible (and audible) the intimate infrastructures of coexistence. The Socratea, whose stilt roots allow it to "walk" toward light, here finds a collaborator in sound. The work proposes that listening is a form of care, and that kinship, in the Anthropocene, must be practiced—one vibration at a time.


images: courtesi of the artist / portrait Christian Braga for Labverde
sound piece > here
video sample > here