Sonic Leaks by the transdisciplinary art and research collective FIELD FLUX is a sound installation that can be seen as part of our installation program Resisting Waters from Thursday to Sunday at Casco Art Institute, accompanied by an artist talk on Sunday 13 September. Click here for the full programme of Resisting Waters.
Sonic Leaks listens to the shape of water and the power that gives it form: the water moving through a system, and the politics of the container that decides where it can go. Wherever water is enclosed – the pipeline, the dam, the metered tap, the gated reservoir – the same conversion repeats: a public substance becomes a saleable container, abundance for those who can pay and stagnation for everyone else. Accelerated, that logic makes water infrastructure a military target, like with the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, strikes on Gulf desalination plants in the current US–Israel attack on Iran, and Gaza, where data indicate nearly 90% of water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged in the ongoing genocide.
How do we listen to the systems that decide who gets to drink? Each container’s resonance, absorption, and diffusion carries the relations of power that placed it there, treating acoustic impedance as a political parameter. A leak is the first failure you can hear: the moment an enclosure stops holding, where pressure finds the crack and the sealed system gives itself away. To hear a leak is to hear power overreach its own containment. A leak is also an opening: a place where a closed system can be entered, and redirected.