SMW:
Thank you dear Yussi for having us here @After- for having us and for this amazing space of listening and gathering. Listening to the Opera as we call it on a dubplate especially made for today produced by After and mixed for the space here. So we are here accompanying the listening experience and making it possible materially and spatially and I am so happy and honoured to have Arnelle Fonlon as a guest of honour and dear friend. It was our dream for a while to actually enable this and be here with you all and start a conversation around the piece but also many other things that are bugging us. We do want to dedicate that to the legacy of peace, which we need at this moment exceptionally urgently. The title: bioluminescence the legacy of peace- was earlier this year introducing the occasion this piece was played at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. The framework was an exhibition and symposium with a public program in January this year with the events title Bioluminescence for the Legacy of Peace.
And I'm passing on the mic.
AF:
Hello everyone. Happy to be here.
Thank you everyone for coming. So I thought I'd start with reading a snippet from the invitation that Susanne sent out to everybody. Then, we went into two poems, one of which Susanne urged me to read, which was written by a good friend of ours, Fred Moten. The other one is by Tishani Doshi, named Species, if that means anything to anybody as well.
Okay, so this is Susanne's writing:
The composition is structured as an opera without human voice still bears the traces of human violence as a pattern and is a composition of sounds natural and synthetic, documentary, cinematic, and scientific. Enacting a sensory inversion of the dominant anthropocentric logic, the dramatic reversal of scale and focus in imagination is built from hydrophone recordings of algae, the sound of green turtles hatching, crabs rubbing their claws together, and other ecological marvels. Forms of media usually associated with the internal drama of men instead express the drama of the planet. While the gravitational currents are a global sculptural form, they move and shape the planet.
Now I introduce into the conversation a poem by Fred Moten, The Intrafacial Layer. This poem was dedicated to me and was born out of the friendship that blossomed between Fred and I during the pandemic. Our friendship started with a timid email from me inviting him to a reading group that I had started. I had read The Undercommons at this point and was viscerally moved, confused, and inspired. This friendship developed into Friday evening cocktails over zoom with our partners and me crying about a lack of community in my field of quantum chemistry. This would lead Fred to invite me to the collective that would introduce me to one of my closest friends, Susanne — The Society for Physical Sociality(/AMCMBM).
Now, here’s The Intrafacial Layer:
the malecón of
cameroon is aerosol
and ceiling, curve
and plane and hold
a little while, hiss
and thickness
in the batterie
and embouchure,
aquella boca curve
a little thick
sometimes. caress
enough release
to seethe, and sea
enough to foam and
vent, to leap and
ground and foment
agricole and massacre.
this rum of fervent and fermentive son
is for arnelle fonlon,
who is propelled by
sunday dinner and
remembrane, of speech
in hearing, in fellowship
with fools in muddy, exonymic
wouri’s scrawl and scroll.
we're too from the good
black dirt. we're too
from the good black
holland houston-jones,
whose air not in
between is a little
history of sip and shhhh,
some cracked, implicit
breath still falling off
to velvet, the physical
chemistry of the good
black beach and bridgetown
spray and mexican diffusion.
Next, I want to read Species by Tishani Doshi. To me, the opera that we listened to feels like a response to this poem. Doshi implores us to consider our relationship to the natural world around us (cite Braiding Sweetgrass or other indigenous scientists) in clear connection to non-capitalistic, cyclical time. Humans are finite, the natural world is in flux and in abundance around us. Isn’t there much we have to learn from the grass and, as Susanne might include, the dinoflagellates as well?
Species by Tishani Doshi:
When it is time, we will herd into the bunker of the earth
to join the lost animals — pig-footed bandicoot, giant sea
snail, woolly mammoth. No sound of chainsaws, only
the soft swish swish of dead forests, pressing our heads
to the lake's floor, a blanket of leaves to make fossils
of our femurs and last suppers. In a million years,
they will find and restore us to jungles of kapok.
Their children will rally to stare at ancestors.
Neanderthals in caves with paintings of the gnu
period. Papa Homo erectus forever squatting over
the thrill of fire. Their bastard offspring with prairie-sized
mandibles,
[Ar stutters: shuddering over the beginnings of speech.]
stuttering over the beginnings of speech. And finally,
us — diminutive species of Homo, not so wise, with our weak necks
and robo lovers, our cobalt-speckled lungs. Will it be for them
as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now
mountains? Will they recognize their own story in the feather-tailed
dinosaur, stepping out of a wave of extinction to tread over blooms
of algae, never once thinking about asteroids or microbial stew?
If we could communicate, would we admit that intergalactic
colonization was never a sound plan? We should have learned
from the grass, humble in its abundance, offering food and shelter
wherever it spread. Instead, we stamped our feet like gods,
marveling at the life we made, imagining all of it to be ours.
So I kind of thought those two poems play really nicely into the dialogue that Susanne is having with these dinoflagellates that are in Oyster Bay in Jamaica.
SWM:
Yeah, indeed we can give a little bit of background from the things that we've been talking with the collective that Arnelle mentioned. I'm trying to materialize a little bit in how this has just been sounding to you. It was really fabulous to play the soundscape of the depth of the ocean, with the dubplate to have a materialization. But it all comes from being quite fascinated or usually I say like kidnapped by a microorganism, a very special microorganism that can create luminescence- energy based on proteins. So while it's one of the oldest organisms that make life possible on this planet, it also is one that has a lot of, you could say sci-fi aspects. When this was coming together for the first time, it also was trying to go beyond this anthropogenic logic or everything constantly circling around the human and some specific humans. Within that species, and even if it sounds stupid that you can never get out of your own position, I still think it's an interesting thought to bounce or something like this — to not stop trying to find another place that's less violent while not running away, but while stepping through. If that makes any sense.
AF:
Maybe there's something I can add to that, which is what our friend Fred likes to say, and I don't know who he gets it from. We were trying to figure out who he gets this from, but “consent to not be a single being” I think is a really good way to sort of describe the ethics of what we're trying to do here, the types of spaces we're trying to make, the conversations and connections we're trying to make is, I wouldn't say maybe antithetical, but outside of the structure of an individual subject.
[Footnote: we determined that Fred is drawing from Edouard Glissant in his emphasis on “consent to not be a single being”.]
SWM:
At a time when I would even say, there's no culture in the face of genocide. I mean things don't make any sense anymore. But it’s good to be here with you all, I just have to mention that.
AUDIENCE: I was going to ask if you could speak more about the dinoflagellates and the world that they inhabit. You mentioned that you really love them. Can you speak more about that? How you encountered them? You said that they were bioluminecent and hearing voices, this kind of roaring sound, like the bestial roaring. There's a roaring of water. There's this bestial roaring. There's some, you know, cackling little claws or like chicken or something. So I just wonder if you could speak more about the life forms that we were just encountering and how you came to first encounter them when you decided to call it.
SMW:
No, thank you. Yes, of course. So my training was in horse care, philosophy and lens based at the art academy later with analog and digital photography, 16mm film and let's say image making, even if I now use mostly CGI. But anything that sparkles in the air and in the water is kind of interesting to capture for someone with a lens-based practice. So you might know the glow worms in the air, these little insects that glow in the summer. Or seasonal, let's say, they glow seasonally. So many organisms have either fluorescence or bioluminescence, the ability to create through a chemical reaction without any other influence, their own light, which is pretty cool. If you would imagine we as a species could do that, we wouldn't have to wreck each other's heads and suck out resources from the planet. Actually, bioluminescence in many places around the world had this sort of sci-fi aspect, an “I can defend you against the colonizer” type of signalling. This is referring to an interview in Vieques with a fisherman who told me about the ancient rituals on the glowing bays in Puerto Rico. He has been fishing for generations there and had indigenous roots but was very concerned about the health of the coastal areas. The glow was respected as a signal to the community and as he explained it being called the aqua viva which was worshipped as a weapon against the colonisers in ancient times.
The experience till now when you swim in the water at night has something magical, not really to be completely explained. Being a witness of the connection with the stars and maybe different cosmology and also the deep down and tiny tiny tiny tiny microscopic. I think that's something that we maybe share – a lot of these conversations also with wider circles of people – how to understand that high pitch of experiencing when it's so difficult to find a strategy, even just calming things.
AF:
I think that kind of makes me think about – so you said we're all connected. I am thinking of the various ways of connecting, language being one of the more obvious ones, but maybe not so obvious – But, I think your conversation with the dinoflagellates maybe gives us an avenue to consider ways of languaging outside of the violence in this paradigm, if that makes sense? Exploring, I don't know, outside of the container of everything we know. This brings to mind our dear friend River Barad’s work on intra-action – a term with ontological and epistemological imperative to rethink the presuppositions of “reality”, and to reconstitute it in the context of specific interactions. What can our contexts, like Susanne’s acceptance to be taken by the microorganisms, teach us about language? What does it mean for Susanne to commun(e)/icate and intra-act with the dinoflagellate communities? To me, this feels reminiscent of electron’s intra-actions with virtual particles, which are always here and there and not here, nor there, always becoming. Perhaps, the languaging falls out of the jazz and play of always becoming/becaming and choosing to always become/became. As electrons emit virtual photons, which can play with themselves and generate/annihilate themselves – as Susanne is in play with these beings that kidnap her and return her as a new configuration, (re)generating herself and (re)constituting herself as part them, part us, always becoming – maybe unlearning/(re)constituting requires unlearning language as barrier, and (re)generating language as amorphous becoming. [footnote: this discussion is inspired by River’s essay “Transmaterialities”.]
AUDIENCE:
I have a question. I was wondering how this was weaponized against a colonial oppressor, how this notion of light-producing entities were adopted by indigenous cultures, how they cooperate with them? Did I understand that correctly?
SMW:
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, historically, the glow that is produced is visible for the people who are on the beach and it's also visible for everything that lives along the coastline. The luminescence has been, as told by Pedro, used as a ritual of worship. Actually, in Nordic traditions – I live most of the time in Norway – the indigenous people and here I am referring to the Sapmi, also have a saying for the glow and in norsk we say “morild”. You can see in the season of early autumn also in Norway(it is a different species of dinoflagellates and the bloom occurs at particular times). Important is being connected to something that's beyond the power of the human, and also beyond the power of the constellations of sky and earth and water, instead it's in the relation. I think this notion is actually something very interesting that we should take more seriously from a scientific side, not just from a storytelling side. So, we have been, for example, investigating how luminescence is an actual healing tool, as many people in coastal areas – from intergenerational knowledge especially but also from different cosmologies in indigenous worlds – view this as something that can be on your side. And that I think is also not only this bringing the light but also empowering for being stronger or for resisting. How can it actually be like an empowering tool and give something of the inspiration or also the resistance and advocacy in our case? In storytelling and in nanotechnology and cancer research, we see how it can be used to enable investigating living tissue. So, that's a huge advantage in high tech. In both of these levels – and that's why we call it decolonizing science – you have the actual knowledge on the same level as the scientific findings. It's actually approaching the same problem from different angles and with different concepts and languages.
AUDIENCE:
Listening to the piece and to the discourse and the questions you're raising and the arguments you're making. Why opera? Why three acts?
SMW:
I chose opera because the human species considers that as the highest art form. So my choice for that genre comes from being concerned with power dynamics. What happens if the highest art form for humans is enacted by micro organisms?
If you dedicate 10 years to working with a microorganism that's invisible without the microscope, then you think about: what is taking space? and where is that space? The imagination that looks for a sound and a space- that's at the core of art. The space that we experience here while listening and I think that's why it's so fabulous to be in here because here everything is sound in space and we are together then in about half an hour it's all gone..
What we're hearing is the sound of the environment (**container**) that they inhabit – their ecological body, the ambient laboratory sounds, as well as the sounds they make in response to their interacting with their environment, the laboratory. So, that's why the question “how isolated can you have them” is interesting and sort of evoked the principles of quantum mechanics.
AF:
Maybe in tandem with the idea of you creating a conversation with the dinoflagellates. It's kind of hard as a quantum chemist to not want to think of quantum entanglement and indeterminacy – to think that you have necessarily entangled yourself with these beings. So, I guess my question is, it's like a two-way arrow. What have you gotten back from them? Do they return you in one piece? Are you always part here, part there with them – indeterminately “present” at all times? This idea of kidnapping feels like a choice to be non-local, indeterminate. This kind of draws out a quantum biological imperative to not be a single being in colonial, forward time.
SWM:
I think the first thing that I had not really understood in the beginning is that we can only see the luminescence when these organisms cluster together, which is a little bit like Schröedinger’s cat. How do we know that they're actually glowing when it has to always be measured? Is this already a form or is it not a form? Can you listen to the sound of an ecosystem of a microorganism? What does that cause? Can it create a different kind of awareness than one that you already know from, let's say, cognitive content? I think that's also this question of what is culture doing in times of this profound crazy violence which is streamed globally? So then to ask, so what is it that we can actually talk about or that we can share? Space, time, mattering, listening, to listen together or witnessing together. Does that answer?
AF:
Not quite.
SMW:
So that would be the clustering, you know. That's something that I learned from them. The big cluster.. otherwise, that sort of glow is actually not even visible.
AUDIENCE:
I don't know what they do alone when they're alone when I'm not there. I remember swimming at night in my childhood. I don't know about colonizers,but as somebody who grew up in the water and went to the sea nearly every night on the island in Istanbul, there was always, and there's not anymore. So they are not there anymore in the sea. But when I was a child, they were there all the time. And it was actually the first time that, I mean, but apart from the spectacle of swimming in the night under the water and you do like this and everything on your body and the ones in turkey that the ones that were there this type was like covering the whole body it was so strong. So it was like most science fiction and this is like the 70s. We didnt have digital animation. We didn't have the word for it, but it felt like a cyber punk techno craziness for our minds as children going to the water and different than the fireflies.
SMW:
Maybe also a bit like Schröedinger’s cat.
AF:
How so?
SMW:
It's dependent on the measurement on how you look at it.
AUDIENCE:
Where you recorded the sounds, did you set the ecosystem yourself? Because you also need a boat, a lab and so on? So I try to visualize what kind of research you went through?
SMW:
It's both correct. So basically we have a little gang you can say a network of collaborators, fisherfolk, scientists, poets and activists. Some of the scientists with a laboratory are growing the species and then make tests with them in the laboratory. With that knowledge we enabled monitoring in the actual ecosystem. So where you monitor the temperature, where you monitor the acidity of the water, the turbulence and all the parameters at minimum necessary to have an abundant glow.
AUDIENCE:
So you get both, like indoors and outdoors?
SMW:
Yes, yes. Because it is a phenomenon that's not completely scientifically pinned down. Before the 60s, there's actually a lot of research money going to bioluminescence in the ocean, because NASA had hoped they could discover a new way of following submarines. Because when you have the glow in the water, you can follow, let's say, the traces of a boat. So it can be used militarily. So the scientists that I've worked with in Puerto Rico and also in Scripps, they had their best time when this money was available to expand and foster research.
What do you hear of a microorganism? Is it us not having the decoding devices or do they not give signals?
AF:
Yes. I like this. In a chemistry classroom or a physics classroom, when they talk about quantum entanglement, they usually say, okay, say you have two particles that are close to each other and are entangled. Then say you move one of the particles from here in Berlin, and to Saskatchewan, Canada. If you were to change the spin of one of them, the other would respond, no matter how far away you take it. So you take one and you put it in Jupiter, you put it wherever, it will respond to changes in the system of the other particle. You know, science communities don't really like to bridge that gap between science and the social, but I think there's a lot to learn from them in the sense of attuning to a form of extrasensory perception. Choosing to be highly in tune to our environments and to the violence that happens in this world that we live in. Choosing to tune in to what's happening in Gaza, in the Congo, in Sudan every day.I think it's a choice for us. And it's maybe a muscle that can be grown, but also in community because it's too hard to do it by yourself. You can't do it by yourself. You crumble. You have to find your people and do it with them, and feel with them, and learn with them.
This is what I've learned from the dinoflagellates, what have you learned? Nary a person has asked this exact question, but Susanne and me. I'll call on people if I have to, I'm a teacher.
SMW:
Can we go a bit more to the gap between the science and the social. As we are both so curious about the philosophical perspective and lets say the confrontation with power. Could you tell a bit more about how with your embodied experience in quantum chemistry the stories spin let’s say in the social but also more than human? The histories of the past and future trajectories?
AF:
Ar. Fonlon is a quantum chemistry Ph.D. student, currently based in Columbus, Ohio. Ar. and Susanne met at a meeting of the research group https://dmamcm.susannewinterling.com/, where Ar. was invited by Fred Moten who was a regular participant. Their friendship materialised in 2025 when Ar. and Susanne presented the planetary opera divided by the currents as a dubplate produced for after, a collective listening space and event run by Yussuf Etiman and his community in Berlin. The conversation and reading after the listening session marked the beginning of the above conversation evolving over the next year into 2026.
![Blackwash [working title]](/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/56fe8ebf-7f16-4486-a251-6d85b1e906c3_4_5005_c.jpeg?itok=rIFeYRMo)
