The River in 24/7
What might 24 hours of listening to the Mississippi waters sound like? Can this goods superhighway, which connects to local contexts down the length of North America with global commodity flows, be made legible in sound? A durational soundpiece, The River in 24/7 created by Isabelle Carbonell and Andres Camacho, takes on these questions, with the work’s seemingly impossible-to-apprehend 24-hour length echoing the scale at which the Mississippi operates according to anthropogenic demands. Included below is a three-hour long extract of the work.
The Mississippi River flows 3782 km from its source at Lake Itasca through the center of the continental United States to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a superhighway of goods: 78% of the world’s exports in feed grains and soybeans travel down the Mississippi, though shipping at the lower end of the river is comprised mostly of petroleum and its derivatives such as pesticides and plastics. This lower section of the river is called the “chemical corridor” or the “cancer alley” of the Mississippi. What might 24 hours of listening to this chemically-laden water sound like? What sets of sonic relations is made possible in these waters? The River in 24/7 is a hyperdurational audio recording of the Mississippi river and, while impossible to listen in the museum in one sitting, the fact that a visitor has to walk away from it at some point, knowing it ass playing before they arrived and will continue to do so after they leave, extends a temporal understanding of the sheer magnitude of the anthropogenic use of this waterway.
Sound design by Andres Camacho
