A soundscape of Malta.
This piece invites listeners to sense Malta’s multiplicity of borders through a continuum of encounters – from borders that end lives to those that persist within life; from moments of difficulty and separation, to borders so insubstantial they might seem absent. It is an invitation to listen with open ears and heart rather than mind – to sense, rather than to know.
In exploring the Maltese border, two intertwined themes emerged: border sacrifices — past sacrifices of physical crossing, present sacrifices of belonging, and future sacrifices of aspiration — and border transformations. A third theme followed naturally from the first two; it was not simply that borders shift or move, but that they are multiple – adaptive to those who approach them long before their journeys begin, continuing to adapt in unceasing ways for some. It is the intensity and frequency of borders that accentuate multiple gradients of hierarchy.
This project became an important exercise in detaching from my typical impulse to explain. I have always found beauty in poetry; and here I allowed that sensibility to guide the process — suggesting rather than declaring, inviting rather than instructing. The soundscape offers fragments of fieldwork, layered with traces of interpretation and observation, yet stripped of overt explanation or evidence. I did, however, rely on direct quotations from informants, observations and interpretations in the field to create a pared, emotive, suggestive space within which the sounds speak – opening a shared space of co-interpretation as co-creation.
This mirrors the approach I undertook during data collection for the ethnography: participant observation and observant participant – listening with, not only to, my informants. The soundscape thus becomes an auto-ethnographic practice of listening: grounded in reflexive awareness of my own positionality. Subjective reflections and feelings about that position also reach toward the listener, prompting similar self-reflexivity about their own subject positions.
I hope you find traces of yourself and your own experiences here. I believe the only path toward mobility justice lies in sharing experience and encounter – allowing sound, empathy, and imagination to cross the borders that words and images so often reinforce.
Thank you for listening.
deconstructing b/orders. 