On Agency, Walls, Birds, and Water, 2026
‘On Agency, Walls, Birds, and Water, 2026’ (29’), Live Performance, The Composers House, Vilnius, 2026
‘On Agency, Walls, Birds, and Water, 2026’, Text, Graphic Sound Scores, Performance, Kintai Arts, 2026
On Agency, Walls, Birds, and Water (2026) was developed during a ‘Sonic Agency’ residency at Kintai Arts in Lithuania in 2026, and presented through a live sound performance at Kintai Music Festival and the Lithuanian Composers’ Union House in Vilnius. The project brings together graphic sound scores, field recordings, electronic composition, voice, and writing to explore agency through the movement and interdependence of birds, water, human bodies, and their environments.
The work began by listening to the ecological surroundings of Kintai: migrating birds, waterways, the Curonian Lagoon, and the movements and exchanges taking place between them. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’ writing on hydrofeminism and the proposition that we are all bodies of water, the project considers agency not simply as an individual capacity to act, but as something that already exists relationally and collectively.
A series of graphic sound scores developed during the residency translates these movements into open forms of notation: currents, migration routes, crossings, loops, tides, traces, and echoes. Rather than prescribing how sound should be performed, the scores invite listening, interpretation, movement, and collective sounding. The accompanying live performance extends these ideas through field recordings of birds and water alongside electronic and composed material, using repetition and looping as methods for allowing sounds to return, accumulate, transform, and move between one another.
At the centre of On Agency, Walls, Birds, and Water is a question of how listening to more-than-human forms of movement might change how we understand our own. In a world increasingly organised through borders, walls, and distinctions between those who belong and those who do not, birds and water offer other models of coexistence: movement through reciprocity, adaptation, collective orientation, and interdependence.
The work asks whether agency is something we need to acquire at all, or something already sounding and moving around us. Through listening care-fully, On Agency, Walls, Birds, and Water considers how recognising these existing relations might create space for empathy, solidarity, and different ways of moving through the world together.