Join MUD Collective for a ‘muddy workshop’, to co-create an explorative sonic entanglement between our feral selves and the earth via a wordless encounter with mud. The sonic dimension traverses (or annihilates) the field(s) between mud and us, inviting a closer encounter with our own bodies, with other bodies, and the body of the earth.

In this participatory, performative, and responsive workshop, we are exploring how mud – a vital yet often neglected material for sustaining life, and the original (geological) recording device – can be used as both a ‘conductor’ and ‘conduit’ in sensing diverse lifeways and forces in more embodied, intimate states.

Through an array of vessels, implements, and sediments, participants will collaboratively use materials and bodies to produce sounding assemblages, amplify earthly rhythms, and newly sense material kinships. Geological time is often associated with the quiet, soft, and slow, but the sound and language of mud has the capacity to change composition through its plasticity in relation to water. We will respond to and record our own physical muddy ‘scores’, made and remade as a result of our live, mouldable soundings.

In the sonic umwelt of mud we seek to understand the role sound can play in encountering and sensing our ecological contexts: from flora and fauna, to soil and sediment. As climate crises and the incessant dogma of anthropocentrism compound political and ecological entanglements, we aspire toward embodied, multi-sensory, and plural knowledge-making.