Longing Energies: Ceremonial Recurrence

Longing Energies: Ceremonial Recurrence, 2024–
Live narrative-based sonic-cook performance
Stereo audio using a geophone, hydrophone, and condenser microphone, amplifying the act of cooking seaweed soup, served together with a customised napkin.
Duration: 45 mins.

Top and left: Documentation of the performance at Galleri Verkligheten, Umeå, 2025.
Right: At the end of the performance, the audience are served seaweed soup.

work description: Ceremonial Recurrence is a narrative-based, durational live sonic-cook performance that invites audiences into an intimate, multi-sensorial encounter. It celebrates renewal and re-imagines reciprocal relations between humans and nonhumans. The layered composition draws on the sea's speculative futures, where longings, energies, and memories are entangled.

At the centre of the work, the act of cooking seaweed soup is amplified through a live sonic set. Around this gesture, the folklore of seaweed soup unfolds: the lyrical labour songs of the Haenyeo (sea women), ceremonial invocations to the Sea Dragon Queen, and interwoven life stories. Waves of voices and rhythmic soundscapes propagate outward while carrying listeners back in time, to memories of the Haenyeo's lives as daughters and mothers diving beneath the sea's surface, surrounded by its teeming vibrancy.

In the performance, the act of cooking seaweed soup is amplified live and interwoven with folklore and haenyeo voices travelling through memories of life as daughters and mothers working beneath the sea’s surface, teeming with vibrant life. Together with a soundscape composed from field recordings of dynamic oceans, water, and industrial environments, the multilayered performance unfolds a speculative future of the sea in which longing, energy, and dreams are intertwined.

The performance invites audiences into a multi-sensory reflection on growth, harvest, and consumption that are entangled with our life stories. While addressing the planetary transitions of our time, it explores how aesthetic practices of sonic fabulation offer a collective experience that can strengthen the speculative capacity to embrace cyclical, resonant perspectives with soundscape, oral transmission, and nature. In doing so, Ceremonial Recurrence resists the fevered pace of knowledge consumption, instead opening new temporalities of wonder.