On Air - On Site : 48 Hours of Radio Art

Aired on May 25th 06:00 CEST 2025
An Ear to River
Genre: Field Recording, Spoken Word
Duration: 60 min
RadioActive: on water An Ear to River ~ counterflows By Blanc Sceol

This podcast asks us to listen with the Channelsea River, a recovering waterway in East London, and home to London’s largest combined sewage outfall, historically discharging 16,000 million tonnes of raw sewage annually into the river.

These discharges have largely stopped since the connection of the Lee tunnel in 2016, enabling the river to begin restoring itself, but it now faces a renewed assault as the new £4.5 billion ‘Tideway Tunnel’ is connected in the coming months. This massive infrastructure project will improve pollution events to London’s inner city rivers, but at great cost and against other more sustainable, lower impact options.

The voice and field recordings bring us into contact with a slippery journey through underground pipes old and new, precarious river living, court battles, hope and uncertainty. This sound piece is part of an ongoing series of site specific actions with the river, enacted by artist duo Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White) since, and in connection with, their part in the establishment of moorings and conservation cooperative ‘Surge Coop’ in 2018.

Surge Cooperative is a collaborative effort to benevolently occupy the Channelsea river in London, as a place for people to live on the water, and a way to acknowledge the living systems that are already present. Our research as artists within and without this cooperative seeks to live with, listen with and act with this vital living system, finding new ways to tackle problems of neglect and misuse whilst navigating ancient acts of parliament and institutional backwaters to advocate on behalf of this waterway.

This piece was made as part of the radio/podcast series ‘RadioActive: on water’ co-curated by Stephen Shiell and Meira Asher in 2024.

Featuring:

Blanc Sceol

We are Blanc Sceol, an artist duo whose work has emerged and expanded, throughout our years of working together, to encompass performance, improvisation, composition, participatory actions, deep listening facilitation, somatic and ritual gatherings.

Since 2018 we have been working site specifically with Channelsea River in London. Our regular practices with river are invitations to ourselves and others to gather, listen, observe and learn through a variety of containers, from workshops to walks, to reading groups, deep listening, live transmissions and collaborations. Through each of these actions our attempts to understand and support river grow and change as we uncover more about the forces at work, both within and without.

www.blancsceol.co.uk www.surge.coop www.radioactiveonwater.com Instagram: @blancsceol