Have you ever seen a swan?

"This is an eco-poetic/mythic piece, a kind of swan song. Named after a line in the film IO, where, in a toxic environment, in a post apocalyptic time, you can no longer see swans. I was particularly inspired by the quietness of this segment of the river, and the description for segment 15 by the person who recorded it, that it was as if they had come upon a secret and secluded place, hiding in a dense stretch of forest, where one man pushes off on a boat, barely rippling the tranquil waters. 

"You can hear mute swans taking off. I re-imagine this lone man as the Swan Knight, or Knight of the apocalypse. I wanted to convey this feeling, of a separate mystical and magical place, as both real and not real. A place of myth but also as place of illusions and deceptive tranquility. I wanted to sonically disrupt that magical flow, of time and the sound of a lone rower, with the reality of climate catastrophe, water and sound pollution. Especially contrasting the clean waters of Germany with the sewage filled water in UK. 

"Fragments can be heard of news commentators speaking about global water bankruptcy. You can hear sounds of me filling bottles of water from my large metal water filter, as it is now no longer advisable to drink tap water in the UK. I wanted to also disrupt the notion of isolation, or that this lone man was really only barely disrupting the surface, when in reality we are all connected, cross-culturally entangled, and everything we do has consequences, often catastrophic, for all humans and creatures of the planet globally, beyond this seemingly peaceful stretch of a river in Bavaria. 

"I researched Bavarian and European mythology about swans and rivers, as well as swan and river mythology in other cultures. I looked for fragments of old recordings of European/German swan music, swan songs and swan poems (for example - extracts from poems by Orlando Gibbons, Jules Renard, and extracts from a poem by Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg used by Schubert for his piece Auf dem Wasser zu singen, , and Mein Lieber Schwan by Wagner, sung in 1930s in English by Walter Midgley ). I looked up scientific research about the river Lech, reservoirs and mute swans, local plant life, and infrasound. I was also very interested in the wider context of the area of segment 15 - the paper mill of Schongau, a Turkish cafe, and history of the executions of 'witches' and the creation of a memorial garden/ the role of gardens / plants, in healing trauma and the planet. Old photographs of the area and how the area had changed through time also influenced how I felt about this stretch of the river Lech. 

"A feeling of irreversible flow toward the end of everything, as we try to reverse the flow, we flow into silence. Through out the piece you can hear the flow of my voice reading extracts from my research and thoughts, the underlying constant sound of the lone man rowing, and sonic interludes and disruptions to unsettle us from our reverie." 

Section of the river Lech reimagined by  Salma Ahmad Caller. 

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Flow is a creative exploration telling the story of a river through the power of sound. The project is a collaboration between the University of Padova and the University of Würzburg, with support from Cities and Memory. Explore the full project at https://citiesandmemory.com/flow.